DOSA: A Dataset of Social Artifacts from Different Indian Geographical Subcultures

Agrima Seth, Sanchit Ahuja, Kalika Bali, Sunayana Sitaram


Abstract
Generative models are increasingly being used in various applications, such as text generation, commonsense reasoning, and question-answering. To be effective globally, these models must be aware of and account for local socio-cultural contexts, making it necessary to have benchmarks to evaluate the models for their cultural familiarity. Since the training data for LLMs is web-based and the Web is limited in its representation of information, it does not capture knowledge present within communities that are not on the Web. Thus, these models exacerbate the inequities, semantic misalignment, and stereotypes from the Web. There has been a growing call for community-centered participatory research methods in NLP. In this work, we respond to this call by using participatory research methods to introduce DOSA, the first community-generated Dataset of 615 Social Artifacts, by engaging with 260 participants from 19 different Indian geographic subcultures. We use a gamified framework that relies on collective sensemaking to collect the names and descriptions of these artifacts such that the descriptions semantically align with the shared sensibilities of the individuals from those cultures. Next, we benchmark four popular LLMs and find that they show significant variation across regional sub-cultures in their ability to infer the artifacts.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.474
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
5323–5337
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.474
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Agrima Seth, Sanchit Ahuja, Kalika Bali, and Sunayana Sitaram. 2024. DOSA: A Dataset of Social Artifacts from Different Indian Geographical Subcultures. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 5323–5337, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
DOSA: A Dataset of Social Artifacts from Different Indian Geographical Subcultures (Seth et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.474.pdf