Large language models (LLMs) struggle to navigate culturally specific communication norms, limiting their effectiveness in global contexts. We focus on Persian *taarof*, a social norm in Iranian interactions, which is a sophisticated system of ritual politeness that emphasizes deference, modesty, and indirectness, yet remains absent from existing cultural benchmarks. We introduce **TaarofBench**, the first benchmark for evaluating LLM understanding of taarof, comprising 450 role-play scenarios covering 12 common social interaction topics, validated by native speakers. Our evaluation of five frontier LLMs reveals substantial gaps in cultural competence, with accuracy rates 40-48% below native speakers when taarof is culturally appropriate. Performance varies between interaction topics, improves with Persian-language prompts, and exhibits gender-based asymmetries. We also show that responses rated “polite” by standard metrics often violate taarof norms, indicating the limitations of Western politeness frameworks. Through supervised fine-tuning and Direct Preference Optimization, we achieve 21.8% and 42.3% improvement in model alignment with cultural expectations. Our human study with 33 participants (11 native Persian, 11 heritage, and 11 non-Iranian speakers) forms baselines in varying degrees of familiarity with Persian norms. This work lays the foundation for developing diverse and culturally aware LLMs, enabling applications that better navigate complex social interactions.

TimeML is an annotation scheme for capturing temporal information in text. The developers of TimeML built the TimeBank corpus to both validate the scheme and provide a rich dataset of events, temporal expressions, and temporal relationships for training and testing temporal analysis systems. In our own work we have been developing methods aimed at TimeML graphs for detecting (and eventually automatically correcting) temporal inconsistencies, extracting timelines, and assessing temporal indeterminacy. In the course of this investigation we identified numerous previously unrecognized issues in the TimeBank corpus, including multiple violations of TimeML annotation guide rules, incorrectly disconnected temporal graphs, as well as inconsistent, redundant, missing, or otherwise incorrect annotations. We describe our methods for detecting and correcting these problems, which include: (a) automatic guideline checking (109 violations); (b) automatic inconsistency checking (65 inconsistent files); (c) automatic disconnectivity checking (625 incorrect breakpoints); and (d) manual comparison with the output of state-of-the-art automatic annotators to identify missing annotations (317 events, 52 temporal expressions). We provide our code as well as a set of patch files that can be applied to the TimeBank corpus to produce a corrected version for use by other researchers in the field.

Low-density languages raise difficulties for standard approaches to natural language processing that depend on large online corpora. Using Persian as a case study, we propose a novel method for bootstrapping MT capability for a low-density language in the case where it relates to a higher density variant. Tajiki Persian is a low-density language that uses the Cyrillic alphabet, while Iranian Persian (Farsi) is written in an extended version of the Arabic script and has many computational resources available. Despite the orthographic differences, the two languages have literary written forms that are almost identical. The paper describes the development of a comprehensive finite-state transducer that converts Tajik text to Farsi script and runs the resulting transliterated document through an existing Persian-to-English MT system. Due to divergences that arise in mapping the two writing systems and phonological and lexical distinctions, the system uses contextual cues (such as the position of a phoneme in a word) as well as available Farsi resources (such as a morphological analyzer to deal with differences in the affixal structures and a lexicon to disambiguate the analyses) to control the potential combinatorial explosion. The results point to a valuable strategy for the rapid prototyping of MT packages for languages of similar uneven density.

The Computing Research Laboratory is currently developing technologies that allow rapid deployment of automatic translation capabilities. These technologies are designed to handle low-density languages for which resources, be that human informants or data in electronically readable form, are scarce. All tools are built in an incremental fashion, such that some simple tools (a bilingual dictionary or a glosser) can be delivered early in the development to support initial analysis tasks. More complex applications can be fielded in successive functional versions. The technology we demonstrate has first been applied to Persian-English machine translation within the Shiraz project and is currently extended to cover languages such as Arabic, Japanese, Korean and others.