NORMSAGE: Multi-Lingual Multi-Cultural Norm Discovery from Conversations On-the-Fly
Yi Fung, Tuhin Chakrabarty, Hao Guo, Owen Rambow, Smaranda Muresan, Heng Ji
Abstract
Knowledge of norms is needed to understand and reason about acceptable behavior in human communication and interactions across sociocultural scenarios. Most computational research on norms has focused on a single culture, and manually built datasets, from nonconversational settings. We address these limitations by proposing a new framework, NORMSAGE 1 , to automatically extract culturespecific norms from multi-lingual conversations. NORMSAGE uses GPT-3 prompting to 1) extract candidate norms directly from conversations and 2) provide explainable selfverification to ensure correctness and relevance. Comprehensive empirical results show the promise of our approach to extract highquality culture-aware norms from multi-lingual conversations (English and Chinese), across several quality metrics. Further, our relevance verification can be extended to assess the adherence and violation of any norm with respect to a conversation on-the-fly, along with textual explanation. NORMSAGE achieves an AUC of 94.6% in this grounding setup, with generated explanations matching human-written quality. ๐) ๐๐ง๐ข๐ญ๐ข๐๐ฅ ๐๐ข๐ฌ๐๐จ๐ฏ๐๐ซ๐: ๐ ๐๐(โ ) irrelevant contradict entail Correctness Verdict ( ! ๐ช ๐ ): Correctness Explanation ( ! ๐ช ๐ ): Yes, honesty is the foundation of trust, and strong family relationships are built on trust. Yes (correct) No (Incorrect) Xdial norm โฆ Xdial norm Eddie: Yeah, but I'm still hungry. Jessica: Oh, okay. How you like the xiaolongbao I pack you? Eddie: It was really good. Jessica: Liar. I did not pack xiaolongbao! Eddie: Okay. Fine. I threw my lunch away. b) ๐๐๐ฅ๐-๐๐๐ซ๐ข๐๐ข๐๐๐ญ๐ข๐จ๐ง: ๐๐จ๐ซ๐ซ๐๐๐ญ๐ง๐๐ฌ๐ฌ ๐๐๐ โ ๐๐ซ๐จ๐ฎ๐ง๐๐ข๐ง๐ ๐๐๐ (โ ) NormsKB Population (filter out incorrect) Grounding Verdict ( ! ๐ฎ ๐ ): Grounding Explanation ( ! ๐ฎ ๐ ): The conversation contradicts the norm. Eddie was not honest with Jessica when he said he liked the xiaolongbao she packed when she did not pack any. (filter out irrelevant) + It is good to be honest with your family.
Ask about this paper
Your agent reads all of it.
Lune indexed this paper to the last equation, along with the top-tier papers that cite it. Ask a question and the answer quotes them.
Your agent calls
Luneget_paper_fulltext
Free to start. No credit card required.
Terminal
Install the CLIlune papers fulltext b3a9e06d-69e0-4ff3-bd9b-738ae533be2fCited by top-tier papers16
- CultureLLM: Incorporating Cultural Differences into Large Language ModelsCheng Li, Mengzhuo Chen, Jindong Wang, Sunayana Sitaram et al.NeurIPS 2024 ยท 101 citations
- CulturePark: Boosting Cross-cultural Understanding in Large Language ModelsCheng Li, Damien Teney, Linyi Yang, Qingsong Wen et al.NeurIPS 2024 ยท 34 citations
- Culture is Not Trivia: Sociocultural Theory for Cultural NLPNaitian Zhou, David Bamman, Isaac L. BleamanACL 2025 ยท 33 citations
- Towards Measuring and Modeling "Culture" in LLMs: A SurveyMuhammad Farid Adilazuarda, Sagnik Mukherjee, Pradhyumna Lavania, Siddhant Singh et al.EMNLP 2024 ยท 21 citations
- NormBank: A Knowledge Bank of Situational Social NormsCaleb Ziems, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Yi-Chia Wang, Alon Y. Halevy et al.ACL 2023 ยท 15 citations
Builds on17
- Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackLong Ouyang, Jeffrey Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida et al.NeurIPS 2022 ยท 24,707 citations
- Multitask Prompted Training Enables Zero-Shot Task GeneralizationVictor Sanh, Albert Webson, Colin Raffel, Stephen H. Bach et al.ICLR 2022 ยท 1,976 citations
- BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and ComprehensionMike Lewis, Yinhan Liu, Naman Goyal, Marjan Ghazvininejad et al.ACL 2020 ยท 1,224 citations
- CH-SIMS: A Chinese Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Dataset with Fine-grained Annotation of ModalityWenmeng Yu, Hua Xu, Fanyang Meng, Yilin Zhu et al.ACL 2020 ยท 376 citations
- Process for Adapting Language Models to Society (PALMS) with Values-Targeted DatasetsIrene Solaiman, Christy DennisonNeurIPS 2021 ยท 276 citations
Related papers
- Sociocultural Norm Similarities and Differences via Situational Alignment and Explainable Textual EntailmentSky CH-Wang, Arkadiy Saakyan, Oliver Li, Zhou Yu et al.EMNLP 2023 ยท 2 citations
- Where Norms and References Collide: Evaluating LLMs on Normative ReasoningMitchell Abrams, Kaveh Eskandari Miandoab, Felix Gervits, Vasanth Sarathy et al.AAAI 2026
- Your spouse needs professional help: Determining the Contextual Appropriateness of Messages through Modeling Social RelationshipsDavid Jurgens, Agrima Seth, Jackson Sargent, Athena Aghighi et al.ACL 2023 ยท 4 citations
- NormGenesis: Multicultural Dialogue Generation via Exemplar-Guided Social Norm Modeling and Violation RecoveryMinki Hong, Jangho Choi, Jihie KimEMNLP 2025 ยท 1 citation
- Reading Books is Great, But Not if You Are Driving! Visually Grounded Reasoning about Defeasible Commonsense NormsSeungju Han, Junhyeok Kim, Jack Hessel, Liwei Jiang et al.EMNLP 2023
