Reading between the Lines: Can LLMs Identify Cross-Cultural Communication Gaps?
Saha, Sougata Pandey, Saurabh Kumar Gupta, Harshit Choudhury, Monojit
Saha, Sougata
Pandey, Saurabh Kumar
Gupta, Harshit
Choudhury, Monojit
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Department
Natural Language Processing
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Conference proceeding
Date
2025
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Language
English
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Abstract
In a rapidly globalizing and digital world, content such as book and product reviews created by people from diverse cultures are read and consumed by others from different corners of the world. In this paper, we investigate the extent and patterns of gaps in understandability of book reviews due to the presence of culturally-specific items and elements that might be alien to users from another culture. Our user-study on 57 book reviews from Goodreads reveal that 83% of the reviews had at least one culture-specific difficult-to-understand element. We also evaluate the efficacy of GPT-4o in identifying such items, given the cultural background of the reader; the results are mixed, implying a significant scope for improvement. Our datasets are available here: https://github. com/sougata-ub/reading_between_lines.
Citation
S. Saha, S. K. Pandey, H. Gupta, and M. Choudhury, “Reading between the Lines: Can LLMs Identify Cross-Cultural Communication Gaps?,” vol. 1, pp. 8043–8067, Jun. 2025, doi: 10.18653/V1/2025.NAACL-LONG.409
Source
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)
Conference
2025 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics-NAACL
Keywords
Cross-Cultural Communication, Large Language Models, Cultural Gaps, Cultural Specific Items, LLM Evaluation, User Study, GPT-4o, Natural Language Processing
Subjects
Source
2025 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics-NAACL
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics