@inproceedings{saha-etal-2025-meta,
    title = "Meta-Cultural Competence: Climbing the Right Hill of Cultural Awareness",
    author = "Saha, Sougata  and
      Pandey, Saurabh Kumar  and
      Choudhury, Monojit",
    editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis  and
      Ritter, Alan  and
      Wang, Lu",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = apr,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.naacl-long.408/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.408",
    pages = "8025--8042",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-189-6",
    abstract = "Numerous recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) are biased towards a Western and Anglo-centric worldview, which compromises their usefulness in non-Western cultural settings. However, ``culture'' is a complex, multifaceted topic, and its awareness, representation, and modeling in LLMs and LLM-based applications can be defined and measured in numerous ways. In this position paper, we ask what does it mean for an LLM to possess ``cultural awareness'', and through a thought experiment, which is an extension of the Octopus test proposed by Bender and Koller (2020), we argue that it is not cultural awareness or knowledge, rather meta-cultural competence, which is required of an LLM and LLM-based AI system that will make it useful across various, including completely unseen, cultures. We lay out the principles of meta-cultural competence AI systems, and discuss ways to measure and model those."
}