FORK: A Bite-Sized Test Set for Probing Culinary Cultural Biases in Commonsense Reasoning Models

Shramay Palta, Rachel Rudinger


Abstract
It is common sense that one should prefer to eat a salad with a fork rather than with a chainsaw. However, for eating a bowl of rice, the choice between a fork and a pair of chopsticks is culturally relative. We introduce FORK, a small, manually-curated set of CommonsenseQA-style questions for probing cultural biases and assumptions present in commonsense reasoning systems, with a specific focus on food-related customs. We test several CommonsenseQA systems on FORK, and while we see high performance on questions about the US culture, the poor performance of these systems on questions about non-US cultures highlights systematic cultural assumptions aligned with US over non-US cultures.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.631
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9952–9962
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.631
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.631
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shramay Palta and Rachel Rudinger. 2023. FORK: A Bite-Sized Test Set for Probing Culinary Cultural Biases in Commonsense Reasoning Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 9952–9962, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
FORK: A Bite-Sized Test Set for Probing Culinary Cultural Biases in Commonsense Reasoning Models (Palta & Rudinger, Findings 2023)
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PDF:
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 https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/2023.findings-acl.631.mp4