4 papers
Figurative and Cultural Knowledge in LLMs: Investigating Cross-Domain Transfer through Fine-Tuning
Mena Attia, Mona Diab, Thamar Solorio
Figurative language is deeply culturally embedded; fluent use requires not just linguistic competence but cultural immersion. We ask whether LLMs can learn this link: does fine-tun…
Multilingual Idioms in Sentences and Conversations Across High-, Medium-, and Low-Resource Languages
Saeed Almheiri, Bilal Elbouardi, Salsabila Zahirah Pranida +16
Idiomatic expressions pose a major challenge for multilingual NLP because their meanings shift between figurative and literal usage, often requiring context for accurate interpreta…
Beyond Understanding: Evaluating the Pragmatic Gap in LLMs' Cultural Processing of Figurative Language
Mena Attia, Aashiq Muhamed, Mai Alkhamissi +2
We present a comprehensive evaluation of the ability of large language models (LLMs) to process culturally grounded language, specifically to understand and pragmatically use figur…
Cross-Cultural Transfer of Commonsense Reasoning in LLMs: Evidence from the Arab World
Saeed Almheiri, Rania Hossam, Mena Attia +4
Large language models (LLMs) often reflect Western-centric biases, limiting their effectiveness in diverse cultural contexts. Although some work has explored cultural alignment, th…