Multilingual and Multimodal Cultural Inclusivity in LLMs

Birds-of-a-Feather Session at COLING 2025, January 23, 2025

The Birds of a Feather session on “Multilingual and Multimodal Cultural Inclusivity in LLMs” fosters a collaborative discussion on the challenges and opportunities of creating LLMs that inclusively represent diverse languages, cultures, and modalities. As LLMs increasingly influence global communication and understanding, ensuring they respect cultural nuances, underrepresented languages, and multimodal interactions remains critical. This session explores current advancements, challenges in addressing linguistic and cultural biases, and strategies for integrating multilingual and multimodal datasets into LLM training. Participants discuss the ethical, technical, and societal implications of these efforts, sharing ideas and solutions to make AI more inclusive and equitable across diverse linguistic and cultural landscapes.

Program

Time Title Presenter/Speaker
11:00 - 11:10 Opening Firoj Alam
11:10 - 11:15 Cultural Alignment in Large Language Models: An Explanatory Analysis Based on Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions Reem I. Masoud
11:15 - 11:30 Shameless Plug for BUCC Talk on Comparable Corpora Kenneth Church
11:30 - 11:45 As many opinions, so many ways: In AI’s path, each culture plays Sougata Saha
11:45 - 12:00 Collecting Culturally Nuanced Image Data: Case Study with CVQA and SEA-VL Haryo
11:45 - 12:00 Native, Local and Cultural Knowledge in LLMs Firoj Alam
12:25 - 12:30 Closing