Progressing beyond Art Masterpieces or Touristic Clichés: how to assess your LLMs for cultural alignment?
António Branco, João Silva, Nuno Marques, Luis Gomes, Ricardo Campos, Raquel Sequeira, Sara Nerea, Rodrigo Silva, Miguel Marques, Rodrigo Duarte, Artur Putyato, Diogo Folques, Tiago Valente
Abstract
Although the cultural (mis)alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) has attracted increasing attention -- often framed in terms of cultural bias -- until recently there has been limited work on the design and development of datasets for cultural assessment. Here, we review existing approaches to such datasets and identify their main limitations. To address these issues, we propose design guidelines for annotators and report on the construction of a dataset built according to these principles. We further present a series of contrastive experiments conducted with this dataset. The results demonstrate that our design yields test sets with greater discriminative power, effectively distinguishing between models specialized for a given culture and those that are not, ceteris paribus.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Wed, 2 Sept 2026.