CultureConverse: A Multilingual Multi-turn Simulation Harness for Culturally Grounded Assistance in East and Southeast Asia
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2608.28405 (cs)
[Submitted on 28 Aug 2026]
Title:CultureConverse: A Multilingual Multi-turn Simulation Harness for Culturally Grounded Assistance in East and Southeast Asia
Authors:Bryan Chen Zhengyu Tan, Weihua Zheng, Thong T. Doan, Bich Ngoc Doan, Jia Wang Peh, Xiaoyuan Yi, Jing Yao, Xing Xie, Nancy F. Chen, Zhengyuan Liu, JinYeong Bak, Wafi Shamdi, Soo Kai Chie, Liew Yu Siong, Aina Azyyati Binti Mohamad Rezal, Lew Yan Yan Vanessa, Huadan Wu, Dylan Raharja, Nadya Yuki Wangsajaya, Akane Fukushige, Kazushi Kato, Koji Inoue, Tatsuya Kawahara, Jaehyung Seo, Dongjun Kim, Seungyoon Lee, Zi Haur Pang, Rui Yang Tan, Charibeth Ko Cheng, Maria Regina Justina Estuar, Jann Railey Montalan, Pham Minh Duc, Roy Ka-Wei Lee
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Abstract:Current cultural evaluations for large language models (LLMs) often reduce culture to single-turn factual recall via MCQs, failing to capture a common use case: users seeking practical help over multiple turns in culturally grounded scenarios. We introduce CultureConverse, a scalable, multilingual simulation and evaluation harness for culturally grounded assistant dialogue that covers 10 East and Southeast Asian regions, 58 subgroup identities, and 7 domains. Each simulated and evaluated episode produces a scored interaction where the assistant assists the user and infers cultural constraints from partial information. The resulting CultureConverse-DS dataset contains 14,610 benchmark (evaluation) episodes and 274,295 oracle-guided (gold-mode) dialogues. In our benchmark evaluation of 18 models, GPT-5 mini achieves the highest assistance quality. Human annotation experiments suggest that our evaluation framework is a sufficient proxy for human judgment. Performance gains from fine-tuning on 27,860 high-quality CultureConverse-DS samples improve in-domain assistance and transfer out-of-domain to cultural MCQ and safety classification benchmarks. We release the harness, both splits, and judge prompts to support interactive evaluation of cultural competency.
| Comments: | EMNLP 2026 |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Computers and Society (cs.CY) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.28405 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2608.28405v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.28405
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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View a PDF of the paper titled CultureConverse: A Multilingual Multi-turn Simulation Harness for Culturally Grounded Assistance in East and Southeast Asia, by Bryan Chen Zhengyu Tan and 32 other authors
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