Culturally Aware Machines: Why and when are they useful?
13Language, culture, and technology are deeply intertwined; any technology that aims to process or generate language must have a nuanced understanding of culture. Yet, culture is elusive, often defying concrete definition, which poses a profound challenge to NLP and AI research. While the NLP community has acknowledged this fact and taken initial steps —developing culture-specific benchmarks and identifying biases in large language models (LLMs)—there remains a gap in addressing why cultural understanding matters for machines, and the real-world impact on users of culturally (un)aware machines. In this talk, I will ask and attempt to answer the following three questions: (1) What can we do better with AI systems that are culturally aware? (2) Why is modeling culture so complex, and what can we learn from psychology and anthropology? (3) How can LLMs, in turn, be leveraged as tools for studying and enhancing our understanding of cultures?