Tootfinder

Cross-Cultural Transfer of Commonsense Reasoning in LLMs: Evidence from the Arab World
Saeed Almheiri, Rania Hossam, Mena Attia, Chenxi Wang, Preslav Nakov, Timothy Baldwin, Fajri Koto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19265

Cetvel: A Unified Benchmark for Evaluating Language Understanding, Generation and Cultural Capacity of LLMs for Turkish
Yakup Abrek Er, Ilker Kesen, G\"ozde G\"ul \c{S}ahin, Aykut Erdem
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16431

Cetvel: A Unified Benchmark for Evaluating Language Understanding, Generation and Cultural Capacity of LLMs for Turkish
We introduce Cetvel, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate large language models (LLMs) in Turkish. Existing Turkish benchmarks often lack either task diversity or culturally relevant content, or both. Cetvel addresses these gaps by combining a broad range of both discriminative and generative tasks ensuring content that reflects the linguistic and cultural richness of Turkish language. Cetvel covers 23 tasks grouped into seven categories, including tasks such as grammatical error corr…

Cultural Constellations: A Journal of Literature and Art https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/08/20/cultural-constellations-a-journal-of-literature-and-art

"AI" can't do social things and is racist. Exponat No. 225424231
(Original title: When “no” means “yes”: Why AI chatbots can’t process Persian social etiquette)
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/09/when-no-means-…

When “no” means “yes”: Why AI chatbots can’t process Persian social etiquette
New study examines how a helpful AI response could become a cultural disaster in Iran.

I guess it’s a good thing, but “the first doctoral program of its kind”? At least from a European perspective, this seems to be a very bold claim.
https://mastodon.education/@bryanalexandee/115260508479458558

Beim #4CultureCommunityPlenary möchten wir Euch auch Einblicke in die teils reinen Präsenz-Veranstaltungen ermöglichen.
Lest also ab morgen, 24.9., hier oder in unserem LinkedIn-Kanal mit:
https://www.

From The Georgia Straight
"The Park Theatre is closing and maybe I shouldn’t be taking it as hard as I am
"It’s unknown what will happen to the physical space the Park is set to depart. Figuratively, it will undoubtedly leave a massive hole in the city’s cultural fabric. It’s also a huge loss for Cambie Village.
"The Park’s final day of operation will be October 26. I plan to stop by there before then to smell the popcorn."

The Park Theatre is closing and maybe I shouldn’t be taking it as hard as I am
The Cambie movie theatre is being shuttered by its corporate overlord, Cineplex.

Arriving at Act I, The Alters is quite engaging. It's a video game, in case you are reaching for your favourite search engine. So far, the sci-fi aspect has that structured feeling of the Eastern European/Soviet branch of the genre, mixed up with the post-Soviet era shift of values and cultural trends -- still kind of bland, but looking at the Western guilty thrill of the dystopian. It's a damn good, well-made game. I hope it holds up in that way until the end.

Another interesting video essay by Patrick Willems. This time it's about the Daniel Craig years of the Bond franchise and how every Bond movie seems to be motivated by two things: the cultural "mood" at the time and the urge to react to how the audience reacted to the previous instalment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

CultureScope: A Dimensional Lens for Probing Cultural Understanding in LLMs
Jinghao Zhang, Sihang Jiang, Shiwei Guo, Shisong Chen, Yanghua Xiao, Hongwei Feng, Jiaqing Liang, Minggui HE, Shimin Tao, Hongxia Ma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16188

CultureScope: A Dimensional Lens for Probing Cultural Understanding in LLMs
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in diverse cultural environments, evaluating their cultural understanding capability has become essential for ensuring trustworthy and culturally aligned applications. However, most existing benchmarks lack comprehensiveness and are challenging to scale and adapt across different cultural contexts, because their frameworks often lack guidance from well-established cultural theories and tend to rely on expert-driven manual annotations. To…

Global Bollywood: Cultural Appropriation, Streaming Media, and the Politics of Representation #acrel https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/

On The Road - To Xi’An/ Departure 🔜
在路上 - 去西安/ 离 🔜
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Kodak Double-X 5222
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

Russia Continues to Destroy Ukraine’s Cultural Heritage: https://benborges.xyz/2025/10/23/russia-continues-to-destroy-ukraines.html

"Aboriginal Groups Win Historic Native Title Victory in Victoria After Decades of Legal Fight"
#Australia #Environment
…

Aboriginal Groups Win Historic Native Title Victory in Victoria After Decades of Legal Fight | Happy Eco News
The native title victory Victoria granted exclusive rights to three Aboriginal groups, recognizing thousands of years of connection to land. This legal win strengthens cultural identity and environmental stewardship while setting a precedent for Indigenous land recognition in Victoria and across Australia.

'woke' is the new 'cultural bolshevism'

DRISHTIKON: A Multimodal Multilingual Benchmark for Testing Language Models' Understanding on Indian Culture
Arijit Maji, Raghvendra Kumar, Akash Ghosh, Anushka, Nemil Shah, Abhilekh Borah, Vanshika Shah, Nishant Mishra, Sriparna Saha
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19274

DRISHTIKON: A Multimodal Multilingual Benchmark for Testing Language Models' Understanding on Indian Culture
We introduce DRISHTIKON, a first-of-its-kind multimodal and multilingual benchmark centered exclusively on Indian culture, designed to evaluate the cultural understanding of generative AI systems. Unlike existing benchmarks with a generic or global scope, DRISHTIKON offers deep, fine-grained coverage across India's diverse regions, spanning 15 languages, covering all states and union territories, and incorporating over 64,000 aligned text-image pairs. The dataset captures rich cultural themes i…

Series A, Episode 12 - Deliverance
MARYATT: [Referring to Cephlon] Is there anything down there?
ENSOR: There was, once. Yes, once it was the trading and cultural centre for this entire star system. Very important, once.
MARYATT: Well, what happened?
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/112/7…

Language policing.
Cancel culture.
Victimhood contests and cultural grievances.
Despite attacking the left for partaking in such practices,
there’s an emerging set of individuals on the right who have became exactly what they’ve criticized.
Meet the woke right.

Video: Opinion | The Right Has Gone Woke
Language policing. Cancel culture. Victimhood contests and cultural grievances. Despite attacking the left for partaking in such practices, there’s an emerging set of individuals on the right who have became exactly what they’ve criticized. Meet the woke right.

Designing with Culture: How Social Norms Shape Trust and Preference in Health Chatbots
Arpita Wadhwa, Aditya Vashistha, Mohit Jain
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15575 https://

Designing with Culture: How Social Norms Shape Trust and Preference in Health Chatbots
AI-driven chatbots are increasingly used to support community health workers (CHWs) in developing regions, yet little is known about how cultural framings in chatbot design shape trust in collectivist contexts where decisions are rarely made in isolation. This paper examines how CHWs in rural India responded to chatbots that delivered identical health content but varied in one specific cultural lever -- social norms. Through a mixed-methods study with 61 ASHAs who compared four normative framin…

Extending FKG.in: Towards a Food Claim Traceability Network
Saransh Kumar Gupta, Rizwan Gulzar Mir, Lipika Dey, Partha Pratim Das, Anirban Sen, Ramesh Jain
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16117

Extending FKG.in: Towards a Food Claim Traceability Network
The global food landscape is rife with scientific, cultural, and commercial claims about what foods are, what they do, what they should not do, or should not do. These range from rigorously studied health benefits (probiotics improve gut health) and misrepresentations (soaked almonds make one smarter) to vague promises (superfoods boost immunity) and culturally rooted beliefs (cold foods cause coughs). Despite their widespread influence, the infrastructure for tracing, verifying, and contextual…

Happy to have a Mastodon post of mine cited in the academic article "Fediverse’s Evolution from the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory" by José- Manuel Meza-Cano and Edith Gonzšlez-Santiago. In: Fast Capitalism, 2023, 20(1). https://fastcapitalism.journal.library

ein noch relativ frischer Aufsatz zum italienischen Sonderweg in Sachen freier Zugang zu gemeinfreiem Kulturgut: Sappa, C., Bossi, L. Postcards from Italy – The Art of Controlling Images of Cultural Goods Better Than Copyright Could. IIC 56, 320–368 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40319-025-01565-w

@… It’s often simply a necessity… And without a cultural understanding, translation only gets you so far.

@… It’s often simply a necessity… And without a cultural understanding, translation only gets you so far.

One of the biggest cultural issues we have is that no major media or journalistic institutions have been reinforcing norms of what things *should* look like. That corruption isn’t normal, that cronyism isn’t normal, that lies and scandals should be punished, that incompetence is disqualifying.
They’ve simply stopped pointing out that there are any standards at are, or that there used to be a bar of any sort. And now an entire generation doesn’t know this concept at all.

Personally, which day of the week do you consider the week to start with? Feel free to explain based on religious, cultural, or economic reasons.

Major outlets have cut or reassigned cultural criticism roles, amid industry contraction and the difficulty of stand-alone reviews generating traffic (Charlotte Klein/New York Magazine)
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/do-media-organiza…

Do Media Organizations Even Want Cultural Criticism?
Do reviews draw readers? Boost subscriptions? Sell ads? And if the answer is ‘no,’ what then? Charlotte Klein explores the precarious state of cultural criticism.

In recent years, Oklahoma has emerged as a pop-cultural locus for America’s hidden racial sins.

I often think it is a disservice that climate change activism has focused on suffering and changes "over there" - our natural environment and cultural life will be as impoverished just as much by loss of familiar species and traditions as the Inuit hunting narwhal or Pacific Islanders forced to retreat from their coastlines.
https://mastodon.scot/@Kerplunk/115241857960561419
Kerplunk@mastodon.scot - @…
We will not just mourn the Beech, the wonderful white lady of the Forest, the Birch is also suffering badly.
No more collecting birch sap in the spring,
making syrup or sugar, no tea from leaves and bark, no bark for starting fires, making knife handles, boxes book covers ornaments. No more wood to make a traditional Kuksa (cup) bowls and toys. No making Birch tar or pitch, no forests in the north where Chaga and many other mushrooms to grow.
I mourn the loss of every tree.

"Polanski calls for sports boycott of Israel."
Ayoub Khan also called it correctly in a BBC interview: it (the Aston Villa decision) is both a safety issue and a matter of opposing genocide.
But depressing that the Canary can't write an article without citing Twitter and contributing to its SEO rankings.
And yes Preston is a third rate political commentator who can't string a thought together.

Zack Polanski says kick Israel out of all sports
Polanski has establishment media rattled as he endorses a 'general boycott of Israeli sports teams' - just like the cultural boycott of Russia

A profile of Katherine Boyle, an a16z partner and a friend to JD Vance, as Silicon Valley increasingly adopts her views, including embracing defense tech (Julia Black/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/business/katherine-b…

The Tech Right Gets Its Own Phyllis Schlafly
Katherine Boyle, an influential venture capitalist who is a friend of the vice president, thinks the country’s path forward involves cultural conservatism and more weapons production.

What's Not on the Plate? Rethinking Food Computing through Indigenous Indian Datasets
Pamir Gogoi, Neha Joshi, Ayushi Pandey, Deepthi Sudharsan, Saransh Kumar Gupta, Lipika Dey, Partha Pratim Das, Kalika Bali, Vivek Seshadri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16286

What's Not on the Plate? Rethinking Food Computing through Indigenous Indian Datasets
This paper presents a multimodal dataset of 1,000 indigenous recipes from remote regions of India, collected through a participatory model involving first-time digital workers from rural areas. The project covers ten endangered language communities in six states. Documented using a dedicated mobile app, the data set includes text, images, and audio, capturing traditional food practices along with their ecological and cultural contexts. This initiative addresses gaps in food computing, such as t…

@… It worked! https://…

Today at the Town Hall Theatre: A Way with Media association with Up Close and Personal Promotions John Lydon - John Lydon - aka Johnny Rotten - changed the face of music and sparked a cultural revolution.
Today at the Town Hall Theatre: A Way with Media association with Up Close and Personal Promotions John Lydon - John Lydon - aka Johnny Rotten - changed the ...

VideoNorms: Benchmarking Cultural Awareness of Video Language Models
Nikhil Reddy Varimalla, Yunfei Xu, Arkadiy Saakyan, Meng Fan Wang, Smaranda Muresan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08543

VideoNorms: Benchmarking Cultural Awareness of Video Language Models
As Video Large Language Models (VideoLLMs) are deployed globally, they require understanding of and grounding in the relevant cultural background. To properly assess these models' cultural awareness, adequate benchmarks are needed. We introduce VideoNorms, a benchmark of over 1000 (video clip, norm) pairs from US and Chinese cultures annotated with socio-cultural norms grounded in speech act theory, norm adherence and violations labels, and verbal and non-verbal evidence. To build VideoNorms, w…

Another classic, ht @…. At first pass, this appears to be a purely technical description of a surprising attack — and then his closing remarks focus more on the then-nascent cultural and legal context of cybersecurity concerns.
But lurking underneath his remarks is this crucial insight: you can’t ever just trust •code• when you’re writing software; at some level, you also have to trust •people•.
https://zirk.us/@cratermoon/115237945294118620
14/

What I find among the most fascinating cultural phenomena to observe is that people believe all sides are playing fair. Many, especially among the left or liberal spectrum, think that once they've just told the right argument or elaborated on the best point, alt-right figureheads will concede and see it their way.
While it's always good to be able to explain yourself, do you truly believe historical oppression and subjugation was honest?
Governments will call whatever you do equi…

Will AI rescue cultural heritage or replace it? In this IEEE video, learn how LLMs act as a compression algorithm for the Internet, enabling new forms of access while simultaneously threatening to replace ground truth with convincing facsimiles.
I also explain why mechanistic analogies, unlike animate metaphors like a child or parrot, can help us tune AI to get optimal results.

Huge Camel Carvings Dating Back 12,000 Years Marked Wet Season Oases Like Cultural Road Signs https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/huge-camel-carvings-dating-back-12000-years-marked-wet-season-oases-like-cultural-road-signs/

Huge Camel Carvings Dating Back 12,000 Years Marked Wet Season Oases Like Cultural Road Signs
The rock art dates to between 12,800 and 11,400 years ago, a period when seasonal water bodies "reappeared" in the region.

Interesting insight via @… on the cultural shifts in these communities:
https://scalie.zone/@aks/115219522857171503

Uncovering Latent Connections in Indigenous Heritage: Semantic Pipelines for Cultural Preservation in Brazil
Luis Vitor Zerkowski, Nina S. T. Hirata
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10911

Uncovering Latent Connections in Indigenous Heritage: Semantic Pipelines for Cultural Preservation in Brazil
Indigenous communities face ongoing challenges in preserving their cultural heritage, particularly in the face of systemic marginalization and urban development. In Brazil, the Museu Nacional dos Povos Indigenas through the Tainacan platform hosts the country's largest online collection of Indigenous objects and iconographies, providing a critical resource for cultural engagement. Using publicly available data from this repository, we present a data-driven initiative that applies artificial int…

CHURRO: Making History Readable with an Open-Weight Large Vision-Language Model for High-Accuracy, Low-Cost Historical Text Recognition
Sina J. Semnani, Han Zhang, Xinyan He, Merve Tekg\"urler, Monica S. Lam
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19768

CHURRO: Making History Readable with an Open-Weight Large Vision-Language Model for High-Accuracy, Low-Cost Historical Text Recognition
Accurate text recognition for historical documents can greatly advance the study and preservation of cultural heritage. Existing vision-language models (VLMs), however, are designed for modern, standardized texts and are not equipped to read the diverse languages and scripts, irregular layouts, and frequent degradation found in historical materials. This paper presents CHURRO, a 3B-parameter open-weight VLM specialized for historical text recognition. The model is trained on CHURRO-DS, the la…

Diversified recommendations of cultural activities with personalized determinantal point processes
Carole Ibrahim, Hiba Bederina, Daniel Cuesta, Laurent Montier, Cyrille Delabre, Jill-J\^enn Vie
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10392

Diversified recommendations of cultural activities with personalized determinantal point processes
While optimizing recommendation systems for user engagement is a well-established practice, effectively diversifying recommendations without negatively impacting core business metrics remains a significant industry challenge. In line with our initiative to broaden our audience's cultural practices, this study investigates using personalized Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs) to sample diverse and relevant recommendations. We rely on a well-known quality-diversity decomposition of the similari…

#SanFrancisco's #Mayor seeems intent of fostering community & trust? Seems a bit out of the blue and disrespectful, but I am sure there is a robust reason for treating community groups like this. /s

Mayor Lurie ends 20-year ‘heritage night’ partnership with indigenous group
American Indian Cultural Center says cutting it from Native American Heritage Night "excludes the very community the event is meant to honor."

#SanFrancisco's #Mayor seeems intent of fostering community & trust? Seems a bit out of the blue and disrespectful, but I am sure there is a robust reason for treating community groups like this. /s

Mayor Lurie ends 20-year ‘heritage night’ partnership with indigenous group
American Indian Cultural Center says cutting it from Native American Heritage Night "excludes the very community the event is meant to honor."

The Cultural Imaginaries of (Dis)Trust
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HERITRACE in action: the ParaText project as a case study for semantic data management in Classical Philology
Francesca Filograsso, Arcangelo Massari, Camillo Neri, Silvio Peroni
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15556

HERITRACE in action: the ParaText project as a case study for semantic data management in Classical Philology
HERITRACE is a semantic data editor designed for cultural heritage institutions, addressing the gap between complex Semantic Web technologies and domain expert needs. ParaText Bibliographical Database, a specialized bibliographical database for ancient Greek exegesis, demonstrates HERITRACE's capabilities in Classical Philology. This paper examines how HERITRACE enables non-technical scholars to manage complex semantic data through SHACL-based form generation and validation, while ensuring comp…

The death of the review? Cultural criticism is at risk of erasure
Recent announcements at major publications have seen critics losing their positions, an ongoing shift that we should all be alarmed by https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/a

CWing for uspol is an unqualified good cultural norm here because I just went back to bluesky for like ten minutes and all the joy and whimsy in my heart blackened and turned to dust and blew out of my solar plexus

On The Road - To Xi’An/ Geometry 📐
在路上 - 去西安/ 几何 📐
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Fujifilm Neopan F, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.CL. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.CL/new
[2/2]:
- Cross-Cultural Transfer of Commonsense Reasoning in LLMs: Evidence from the Arab World
Saeed Almheiri, Rania Hossam, Mena Attia, Chenxi Wang, Preslav Nakov, Timothy Baldwin, Fajri Koto

Policy, Risk, and Norms Shape Collective Behaviors Worldwide
Dhruv Mittal, Sara M. Constantino, Simon A. Levin, Peter Sloot, Elke U. Weber, V\'itor V. Vasconcelos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15098

Policy, Risk, and Norms Shape Collective Behaviors Worldwide
Societal responses to environmental change vary widely, even under comparable shocks, reflecting differences in both policy measures and public reactions shaped by cultural and socioeconomic contexts. We examine mask-wearing dynamics across 47 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic using a process-based, utility-driven model of individual behavior with three evolving drivers: policy stringency, disease risk, and social norms to understand emergent collective behavior. Calibrated with daily data…

A Unified Framework for Cultural Heritage Data Historicity and Migration: The ARGUS Approach
Lingxiao Kong, Apostolos Sarris, Miltiadis Polidorou, Victor Klingenberg, Vasilis Sevetlidis, Vasilis Arampatzakis, George Pavlidis, Cong Yang, Zeyd Boukhers
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06044

A Unified Framework for Cultural Heritage Data Historicity and Migration: The ARGUS Approach
Cultural heritage preservation faces significant challenges in managing diverse, multi-source, and multi-scale data for effective monitoring and conservation. This paper documents a comprehensive data historicity and migration framework implemented within the ARGUS project, which addresses the complexities of processing heterogeneous cultural heritage data. We describe a systematic data processing pipeline encompassing standardization, enrichment, integration, visualization, ingestion, and publ…

'Sick Game': Democratic Megadonor David Geffen, 82, Faces Sordid Grooming Lawsuit from Porn Star Husband, 32, as Top Cultural Centers Take His Millions and Toast Him on Both Coasts (Chuck Ross/The Washington Free Beacon)
https://freebeacon.com/democrats/sick-game-democratic-megadonor-david-geffen-82-faces-sordid-grooming-lawsuit-from-porn-star-husband-32-as-top-cultural-centers-take-his-millions-and-toast-him-on-both-coasts/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250903/p31#a250903p31

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #RoundMidnight
Nok Cultural Ensemble:
🎵 Awakening (feat. Theon Cross)
#NokCulturalEnsemble
https://open.spotify.com/track/4OvwBYkNVxlcRMwp7Nonuy

Photos: SFU unveils new cultural landmark with the Gibson Art Museum
https://www.straight.com/arts/photos-sfu-unveils-new-cultural-landmark-with-gibson-art-museum?ref=cascadia-journal.ghost.io#
Simo…

The setting of the #ag2025goerlitz astronomy conference (here during the general assembly): a former synagogue, now a Görlitz cultural center.

The Cultural Imaginaries of (Dis)Trust
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updated: Wednesday, September 24, 2025 - 12:03amfull name / name of organization: Vilnius…
via Input 4 RELCFP https://

A review of cultural heritage inspection: Toward terahertz from mid-infrared region
Pengfei Zhu, Hai Zhang, Stefano Sfarra, Dazhi Yang, Xavier Maldague
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11521

A review of cultural heritage inspection: Toward terahertz from mid-infrared region
This review explores non-invasive imaging (NII) methods covering the mid- and far-infrared to the terahertz spectral regions (up to approximately 1000 um) for the detection and analysis of cultural heritage artifacts. In the thermal infrared domain, where radiation follows Planck's law, the self-emission of materials reveals intrinsic properties and internal degradation. By contrast, in the near-infrared range, external illumination enhances surface details and pigment differentiation. Far-infr…

Fostering cultural change in research through innovative knowledge sharing, evaluation, and community engagement strategies
Junsuk Rho, Jinn-Kong Sheu, Andrew Forbes, Din Ping Tsai, Andrea Al\'u, Wei Li, Mark Brongersma, Joonhee Choi, Javier Garcia de Abajo, Laura Na Liu, Alexander Szameit, Tracy Schloemer, Andreas Tittl, Mario Chemnitz, Cheng Wang, Jiejun Zhang, Yuri Kivshar, Tie Jun Cui, Ren-Min Ma, Cheng-Wei Qiu, Cuicui Lu, Yao-Wei Huang, Miguel Angel Solis Prosser, Ileana-Crist…

Fostering cultural change in research through innovative knowledge sharing, evaluation, and community engagement strategies
Scientific research needs a new system that appropriately values science and scientists. Key innovations, within institutions and funding agencies, are driving better assessment of research, with open knowledge and FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) principles as central pillars. Furthermore, coalitions, agreements, and robust infrastructures have emerged to promote more accurate assessment metrics and efficient knowledge sharing. However, despite these efforts, the system…

"This strange brew of shock, confusion, and ambivalence, I’ve realized, is the defining emotion of the generative-AI era. Three years into the hype, it seems that one of AI’s enduring cultural impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it."
https:/…

AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event
Three years in, one of AI’s enduring impacts is to make people feel like they’re losing it.

Everyday Physics in Korean Contexts: A Culturally Grounded Physical Reasoning Benchmark
Jihae Jeong, DaeYeop Lee, DongGeon Lee, Hwanjo Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17807 https:…

Everyday Physics in Korean Contexts: A Culturally Grounded Physical Reasoning Benchmark
Existing physical commonsense reasoning benchmarks predominantly focus on Western contexts, overlooking cultural variations in physical problem-solving. To address this gap, we introduce EPiK (Everyday Physics in Korean Contexts), a novel benchmark comprising 181 binary-choice problems that test physical reasoning within Korean cultural contexts, ranging from kimchi (Korean food) to traditional fermentation. EPiK is constructed using a two-stage generation and verification pipeline to create cu…

Ashes or Breath: Exploring Moral Dilemmas of Life and Cultural Legacy through Mixed Reality Gaming
Black Sun, Ge Kacy Fu, Shichao Guo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13074 https://…

Ashes or Breath: Exploring Moral Dilemmas of Life and Cultural Legacy through Mixed Reality Gaming
Traditional approaches to teaching moral dilemmas often rely on abstract, disembodied scenarios that limit emotional engagement and reflective depth. To address this gap, we developed \textit{Ashes or Breath}, a Mixed Reality game delivered via head-mounted displays(MR-HMDs). This places players in an ethical crisis: they must save a living cat or a priceless cultural artifact during a museum fire. Designed through an iterative, values-centered process, the experience leverages embodied interac…

Automated Building Heritage Assessment Using Street-Level Imagery
Kristina Dabrock, Tim Johansson, Anna Donarelli, Mikael Mangold, Noah Pflugradt, Jann Michael Weinand, Jochen Lin{\ss}en
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11486

Automated Building Heritage Assessment Using Street-Level Imagery
Detailed data is required to quantify energy conservation measures in buildings, such as envelop retrofits, without compromising cultural heritage. Novel artificial intelligence tools may improve efficiency in identifying heritage values in buildings compared to costly and time-consuming traditional inventories. In this study, the large language model GPT was used to detect various aspects of cultural heritage value in façade images. Using this data and building register data as features, mach…

🎼 Unser NFDI4Culture-Kollege @…, Martin Albrecht-Hohmaier präsentiert hier auf der #gfm25 die Open Educational Resource des Teams der Cultural Research Data Academy, die kürzlich auf unserem Culture Information Portal erschienen ist:

Morphological Synthesizer for Ge'ez Language: Addressing Morphological Complexity and Resource Limitations
Gebrearegawi Gebremariam, Hailay Teklehaymanot, Gebregewergs Mezgebe
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20341

Morphological Synthesizer for Ge'ez Language: Addressing Morphological Complexity and Resource Limitations
Ge'ez is an ancient Semitic language renowned for its unique alphabet. It serves as the script for numerous languages, including Tigrinya and Amharic, and played a pivotal role in Ethiopia's cultural and religious development during the Aksumite kingdom era. Ge'ez remains significant as a liturgical language in Ethiopia and Eritrea, with much of the national identity documentation recorded in Ge'ez. These written materials are invaluable primary sources for studying Ethiopian and Eritrean philo…

The Cultural Imaginaries of (Dis)Trust
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XLQA: A Benchmark for Locale-Aware Multilingual Open-Domain Question Answering
Keon-Woo Roh, Yeong-Joon Ju, Seong-Whan Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16139 https://

XLQA: A Benchmark for Locale-Aware Multilingual Open-Domain Question Answering
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant progress in Open-domain question answering (ODQA), yet most evaluations focus on English and assume locale-invariant answers across languages. This assumption neglects the cultural and regional variations that affect question understanding and answer, leading to biased evaluation in multilingual benchmarks. To address these limitations, we introduce XLQA, a novel benchmark explicitly designed for locale-sensitive multilingual ODQA. XLQA contai…

Cultural criticism is at risk of erasure, as the Chicago Tribune cut its film critic job, VF fired its film critic, and the NYT reassigned four arts critics (Jesse Hassenger/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/aug/26/movie-reviews-c…

Cultural Constellations: A Journal of Literature and Art
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AI-Agents for Culturally Diverse Online Higher Education Environments
Fuze Sun, Paul Craig, Lingyu Li, Shixiangyue Meng, Chuxi Nan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10520 https://

AI-Agents for Culturally Diverse Online Higher Education Environments
As the global reach of online higher education continues to grow, universities are increasingly accommodating students from diverse cultural backgrounds \parencite{tereshko2024culturally}. This can present a number of challenges including linguistic barriers \parencite{ullah2021linguistic}, cultural differences in learning style \parencite{omidvar2012cultural}, cultural sensitivity in course design \parencite{nguyen2022cultural} and perceived isolation when students feel their perspectives or e…

Bridging Cultural Distance Between Models Default and Local Classroom Demands: How Global Teachers Adopt GenAI to Support Everyday Teaching Practices
Ruiwei Xiao, Qing Xiao, Xinying Hou, Hanqi Jane Li, Phenyo Phemelo Moletsane, Hong Shen, John Stamper
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10780

Bridging Cultural Distance Between Models Default and Local Classroom Demands: How Global Teachers Adopt GenAI to Support Everyday Teaching Practices
Generative AI (GenAI) is rapidly entering K-12 classrooms, offering teachers new ways for teaching practices. Yet GenAI models are often trained on culturally uneven datasets, embedding a "default culture" that often misaligns with local classrooms. To understand how teachers navigate this gap, we defined the new concept Cultural Distance (the gap between GenAI's default cultural repertoire and the situated demands of teaching practice) and conducted in-depth interviews with 30 K-12 teachers, 1…

The demise of the corporation for public broadcasting,
known as CPB,
is a direct result of Donald Trump’s targeting of public media,
which he has repeatedly said is spreading political and cultural views antithetical to those the United States should be espousing.
The closure is expected to have a profound impact on the journalistic and cultural landscape
— in particular, public radio and TV stations in small communities across the United States. 
CPB help…

CPB says it is shutting down after being defunded by Congress, targeted by Trump
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced Friday it would take steps toward its own closure after being defunded by Congress — marking the end of a nearly six-decade era in which it fueled the production of renowned educational programming, cultural content and even emergency alerts.

On The Road - To Xi’An/Objects 🔶
在路上 - 去西安/物 🔶
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Kodak Double-X 5222
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

Global Bollywood: Cultural Appropriation, Streaming Media, and the Politics of Representation
https://ift.tt/Rp8l6Pj
updated: Wednesday, September 24, 2025 - 10:57amfull name / name of organization: Tanima Kumari,…
via Input 4 RELCFP

ALIGN: Word Association Learning for Cross-Cultural Generalization in Large Language Models
Chunhua Liu, Kabir Manandhar Shrestha, Sukai Huang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13426 h…

ALIGN: Word Association Learning for Cross-Cultural Generalization in Large Language Models
As large language models (LLMs) increasingly mediate cross-cultural communication, their behavior still reflects the distributional bias of the languages and viewpoints that are over-represented in their pre-training corpora. Yet, it remains a challenge to model and align culture due to limited cultural knowledge and a lack of exploration into effective learning approaches. We introduce a cost-efficient, cognitively grounded remedy: parameter-efficient fine-tuning on native speakers' free word-…

Ambani family postpones New York cultural event amid fraught U.S.-India trade ties (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/india/ambani-family-postpones-new-york-cultural-event-amid-fraught-usindia-trade-ties-2025-09-01/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250901/p5#a250901p5

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on BBCRadio3's #RoundMidnight
Nok Cultural Ensemble:
🎵 Awakening (feat. Theon Cross)
#NokCulturalEnsemble
https://open.spotify.com/track/4OvwBYkNVxlcRMwp7Nonuy

VQArt-Bench: A semantically rich VQA Benchmark for Art and Cultural Heritage
A. Alfarano (University of Zurich, Max Planck Society), L. Venturoli (University of Zurich, Max Planck Society), D. Negueruela del Castillo (University of Zurich, Max Planck Society)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12750

VQArt-Bench: A semantically rich VQA Benchmark for Art and Cultural Heritage
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant capabilities in joint visual and linguistic tasks. However, existing Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmarks often fail to evaluate deep semantic understanding, particularly in complex domains like visual art analysis. Confined to simple syntactic structures and surface-level attributes, these questions fail to capture the diversity and depth of human visual inquiry. This limitation incentivizes models to exploit statisti…

Moody Urbanity - Urban Geometry 📐
情绪化城市 - 都市几何 📐
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️ Kentmere Pan 400
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

The Alliance for International Exchange told Newsweek that it had learned that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)
🆘 had decided to cut at least 22 offerings from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA)
totaling around $100 million in annual funding.
"While this does not impact flagship programs like Fulbright, Gilman, and IVLP at the moment,
it sets a dangerous precedent," Mark Overmann, executive director of the Alliance, told Newsweek. …

Fears Over Fulbright's Future as Trump Admin Cuts Exchange Programs
Funding for over 20 programs was reported to have been cut, leaving participants in limbo.

'Too much alignment; not enough culture': Re-balancing cultural alignment practices in LLMs
Eric J. W. Orlowski, Hakim Norhashim, Tristan Koh Ly Wey
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26167

'Too much alignment; not enough culture': Re-balancing cultural alignment practices in LLMs
While cultural alignment has increasingly become a focal point within AI research, current approaches relying predominantly on quantitative benchmarks and simplistic proxies fail to capture the deeply nuanced and context-dependent nature of human cultures. Existing alignment practices typically reduce culture to static demographic categories or superficial cultural facts, thereby sidestepping critical questions about what it truly means to be culturally aligned. This paper argues for a fundamen…

Designing LLMs for cultural sensitivity: Evidence from English-Japanese translation
Helene Tenzer, Oumnia Abidi, Stefan Feuerriegel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11921 https://

Designing LLMs for cultural sensitivity: Evidence from English-Japanese translation
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in everyday communication, including multilingual interactions across different cultural contexts. While LLMs can now generate near-perfect literal translations, it remains unclear whether LLMs support culturally appropriate communication. In this paper, we analyze the cultural sensitivity of different LLM designs when applied to English-Japanese translations of workplace e-mails. Here, we vary the prompting strategies: (1) naive "just translat…

Challenges and Opportunities for Participatory Design of Conversational Agents for Young People's Wellbeing
Natalia Kucirkova, Alexis Hiniker, Megumi Ishikawa, Sho Tsuji, Aayushi Dangol, Robert Wolfe
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14787

Challenges and Opportunities for Participatory Design of Conversational Agents for Young People's Wellbeing
This paper outlines the challenges and opportunities of research on conversational agents with children and young people across four countries, exploring the ways AI technologies can support children's well-being across social and cultural contexts.

Neuron-Level Analysis of Cultural Understanding in Large Language Models
Taisei Yamamoto, Ryoma Kumon, Danushka Bollegala, Hitomi Yanaka
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08284 https:/…

Neuron-Level Analysis of Cultural Understanding in Large Language Models
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed worldwide, ensuring their fair and comprehensive cultural understanding is important. However, LLMs exhibit cultural bias and limited awareness of underrepresented cultures, while the mechanisms underlying their cultural understanding remain underexplored. To fill this gap, we conduct a neuron-level analysis to identify neurons that drive cultural behavior, introducing a gradient-based scoring method with additional filtering for precise…

Planet LangLit 2026: International Conference on Language, Literature and Cultural Studies https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/08/14/planet-langlit-2026-international-conference-on-language-literature-…

Do LLMs Understand Wine Descriptors Across Cultures? A Benchmark for Cultural Adaptations of Wine Reviews
Chenye Zou, Xingyue Wen, Tianyi Hu, Qian Janice Wang, Daniel Hershcovich
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12961

Do LLMs Understand Wine Descriptors Across Cultures? A Benchmark for Cultural Adaptations of Wine Reviews
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened the door to culture-aware language tasks. We introduce the novel problem of adapting wine reviews across Chinese and English, which goes beyond literal translation by incorporating regional taste preferences and culture-specific flavor descriptors. In a case study on cross-cultural wine review adaptation, we compile the first parallel corpus of professional reviews, containing 8k Chinese and 16k Anglophone reviews. We benchmark both ne…

Pre/Absence: Prompting Cultural Awareness and Understanding for Lost Architectural Heritage in Virtual Reality
Yaning Li, Ke Zhao, Shucheng Zheng, Xingyu Chen, Chenyi Chen, Wenxi Dai, Weile Jiang, Qi Dong, Yiqing Zhao, Meng Li, Lin-Ping Yuan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07967

Pre/Absence: Prompting Cultural Awareness and Understanding for Lost Architectural Heritage in Virtual Reality
Lost architectural heritage presents interpretive challenges due to vanished structures and fragmented historical records. Using Hanyuan Hall of the Tang dynasty's Daming Palace as a case study, we conducted a formative investigation with archaeologists, heritage administrators, and visitors to identify key issues in current interpretation practices. We found that these practices often compress complex cultural layers into factual summaries and rely on linear narratives that overlook the contin…

Culturally-Aware Conversations: A Framework & Benchmark for LLMs
Shreya Havaldar, Sunny Rai, Young-Min Cho, Lyle Ungar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11563 https://

Culturally-Aware Conversations: A Framework & Benchmark for LLMs
Existing benchmarks that measure cultural adaptation in LLMs are misaligned with the actual challenges these models face when interacting with users from diverse cultural backgrounds. In this work, we introduce the first framework and benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs in realistic, multicultural conversational settings. Grounded in sociocultural theory, our framework formalizes how linguistic style - a key element of cultural communication - is shaped by situational, relational, and cultural …

HebID: Detecting Social Identities in Hebrew-language Political Text
Guy Mor-Lan, Naama Rivlin-Angert, Yael R. Kaplan, Tamir Sheafer, Shaul R. Shenhav
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15483

HebID: Detecting Social Identities in Hebrew-language Political Text
Political language is deeply intertwined with social identities. While social identities are often shaped by specific cultural contexts and expressed through particular uses of language, existing datasets for group and identity detection are predominantly English-centric, single-label and focus on coarse identity categories. We introduce HebID, the first multilabel Hebrew corpus for social identity detection: 5,536 sentences from Israeli politicians' Facebook posts (Dec 2018-Apr 2021), manually…

Data Work in Memory Institutions: Why and How Information Professionals Use Wikidata
Riya Sinha, Amelia Acker, Hanlin Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13388 https://

Data Work in Memory Institutions: Why and How Information Professionals Use Wikidata
Wikidata, an open structured database and a sibling project to Wikipedia, has recently become an important platform for information professionals to share structured metadata from their memory institutions, organizations that maintain public knowledge and cultural heritage materials. While studies have investigated why and how peer producers contribute to Wikidata, the institutional motivations and practices of these organizations are less understood. Given Wikidata's potential role in linking …

A method for improving multilingual quality and diversity of instruction fine-tuning datasets
Chunguang Zhao, Yilun Liu, Pufan Zeng, Yuanchang Luo, Shimin Tao, Minggui He, Weibin Meng, Song Xu, Ziang Chen, Chen Liu, Hongxia Ma, Li Zhang, Boxing Chen, Daimeng Wei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15549

A method for improving multilingual quality and diversity of instruction fine-tuning datasets
Multilingual Instruction Fine-Tuning (IFT) is essential for enabling large language models (LLMs) to generalize effectively across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. However, the scarcity of high-quality multilingual training data and corresponding building method remains a critical bottleneck. While data selection has shown promise in English settings, existing methods often fail to generalize across languages due to reliance on simplistic heuristics or language-specific assumptions. In…

Negotiations: An International Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies, https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/10/08/negotiations-an-international-journal-of-literary-and-cultural-studies

WangchanThaiInstruct: An instruction-following Dataset for Culture-Aware, Multitask, and Multi-domain Evaluation in Thai
Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Pume Tuchinda, Lalita Lowphansirikul, Surapon Nonesung, Panuthep Tasawong, Alham Fikri Aji, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Sarana Nutanong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15239…

WangchanThaiInstruct: An instruction-following Dataset for Culture-Aware, Multitask, and Multi-domain Evaluation in Thai
Large language models excel at instruction-following in English, but their performance in low-resource languages like Thai remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks often rely on translations, missing cultural and domain-specific nuances needed for real-world use. We present WangchanThaiInstruct, a human-authored Thai dataset for evaluation and instruction tuning, covering four professional domains and seven task types. Created through a multi-stage quality control process with annotators, dom…

Principle Methods of Rendering Non-equivalent Words from Uzbek and Dari to Russian and English
Mohammad Ibrahim Qani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15453 https://

Principle Methods of Rendering Non-equivalent Words from Uzbek and Dari to Russian and English
These pure languages understanding directly relates to translation knowledge where linguists and translators need to work and research to eradicate misunderstanding. Misunderstandings mostly appear in non-equivalent words because there are different local and internal words like food, garment, cultural and traditional words and others in every notion. Truly, most of these words do not have equivalent in the target language and these words need to be worked and find their equivalent in the targe…

LECTURE> Bernard Faure, "Awakening a no-brainer?" at Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia, Austrian Academy of Sciences
https://ift.tt/SNLM3qg
Seeking Book Reviewers for Women and Social Movements in the United States Erica Hayden 10/06/2025 -…
via Input 4 RELCFP

HumorPlanSearch: Structured Planning and HuCoT for Contextual AI Humor
Shivam Dubey
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11429 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11429

HumorPlanSearch: Structured Planning and HuCoT for Contextual AI Humor
Automated humor generation with Large Language Models (LLMs) often yields jokes that feel generic, repetitive, or tone-deaf because humor is deeply situated and hinges on the listener's cultural background, mindset, and immediate context. We introduce HumorPlanSearch, a modular pipeline that explicitly models context through: (1) Plan-Search for diverse, topic-tailored strategies; (2) Humor Chain-of-Thought (HuCoT) templates capturing cultural and stylistic reasoning; (3) a Knowledge Graph to r…

Biased Tales: Cultural and Topic Bias in Generating Children's Stories
Donya Rooein, Vil\'em Zouhar, Debora Nozza, Dirk Hovy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07908 https://

Biased Tales: Cultural and Topic Bias in Generating Children's Stories
Stories play a pivotal role in human communication, shaping beliefs and morals, particularly in children. As parents increasingly rely on large language models (LLMs) to craft bedtime stories, the presence of cultural and gender stereotypes in these narratives raises significant concerns. To address this issue, we present Biased Tales, a comprehensive dataset designed to analyze how biases influence protagonists' attributes and story elements in LLM-generated stories. Our analysis uncovers stri…

Pragyaan: Designing and Curating High-Quality Cultural Post-Training Datasets for Indian Languages
Neel Prabhanjan Rachamalla, Aravind Konakalla, Gautam Rajeev, Ashish Kulkarni, Chandra Khatri, Shubham Agarwal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07000

Pragyaan: Designing and Curating High-Quality Cultural Post-Training Datasets for Indian Languages
The effectiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) depends heavily on the availability of high-quality post-training data, particularly instruction-tuning and preference-based examples. Existing open-source datasets, however, often lack multilingual coverage, cultural grounding, and suffer from task diversity gaps that are especially pronounced for Indian languages. We introduce a human-in-the-loop pipeline that combines translations with synthetic expansion to produce reliable and diverse Indic…

Culinary Crossroads: A RAG Framework for Enhancing Diversity in Cross-Cultural Recipe Adaptation
Tianyi Hu, Andrea Morales-Garz\'on, Jingyi Zheng, Maria Maistro, Daniel Hershcovich
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21934

Culinary Crossroads: A RAG Framework for Enhancing Diversity in Cross-Cultural Recipe Adaptation
In cross-cultural recipe adaptation, the goal is not only to ensure cultural appropriateness and retain the original dish's essence, but also to provide diverse options for various dietary needs and preferences. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a promising approach, combining the retrieval of real recipes from the target cuisine for cultural adaptability with large language models (LLMs) for relevance. However, it remains unclear whether RAG can generate diverse adaptation results. Our a…

AWARE, Beyond Sentence Boundaries: A Contextual Transformer Framework for Identifying Cultural Capital in STEM Narratives
Khalid Mehtab Khan, Anagha Kulkarni
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04983

AWARE, Beyond Sentence Boundaries: A Contextual Transformer Framework for Identifying Cultural Capital in STEM Narratives
Identifying cultural capital (CC) themes in student reflections can offer valuable insights that help foster equitable learning environments in classrooms. However, themes such as aspirational goals or family support are often woven into narratives, rather than appearing as direct keywords. This makes them difficult to detect for standard NLP models that process sentences in isolation. The core challenge stems from a lack of awareness, as standard models are pre-trained on general corpora, leav…