Do LLMs Use Cultural Knowledge Without Being Told? A Multilingual Evaluation of Implicit Pragmatic Adaptation
Many benchmarks show that large language models can answer direct questions about culture. We study a different question: do they also change how they speak when culture is only implied by the situation? We evaluate 60 culturally grounded conversational scenarios across five languages in three conditions: a neutral baseline (Prompt A), an explicit cultural instruction (Prompt B), and implicit situational cueing (Prompt C). We score responses on 12 pragmatic features covering deference to authority, individual-versus-group framing, and uncertainty management. We define Pragmatic Context Sensitivity (PCS) as the fraction of the Prompt A->B shift that reappears under Prompt A->C. Across four...
| Authors | Mehwish Nasim, Sanjeevan Selvaganapathy, Neel Ganapathi Sabhahit et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 20 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 20 April 2026 |
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