LoFTI: Localization and Factuality Transfer to Indian Locales

Sona Elza Simon, Soumen Kumar Mondal, Abhishek Singhania, Sayambhu Sen, Preethi Jyothi


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) encode vast amounts of world knowledge acquired via training on large web-scale datasets crawled from the internet. However, the datasets used to train the LLMs typically exhibit a geographical bias towards English-speaking Western countries. This results in LLMs producing biased or hallucinated responses to queries that require answers localized to other geographical regions. In this work, we introduce a new benchmark named LoFTI (Localization and Factuality Transfer to Indian Locales) that can be used to evaluate an LLM’s contextual localization and factual text transfer capabilities. LoFTI consists of factual statements about entities in source and target locations; the source locations are spread across the globe and the target locations are all within India with varying degrees of hyperlocality (country, states, cities). The entities span a wide variety of categories. We use LoFTI to evaluate Mixtral, Llama3.3-70B, GPT-4 and two other Mixtral-based approaches well-suited to the task of localized factual transfer. We demonstrate that LoFTI is a high-quality evaluation benchmark and all the models, including GPT-4, produce skewed results across varying levels of hyperlocality.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.854
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
16635–16662
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/transition-to-people-yaml/2025.findings-acl.854/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.854
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sona Elza Simon, Soumen Kumar Mondal, Abhishek Singhania, Sayambhu Sen, and Preethi Jyothi. 2025. LoFTI: Localization and Factuality Transfer to Indian Locales. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 16635–16662, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LoFTI: Localization and Factuality Transfer to Indian Locales (Simon et al., Findings 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/transition-to-people-yaml/2025.findings-acl.854.pdf