Figurative and Cultural Knowledge in LLMs: Investigating Cross-Domain Transfer through Fine-Tuning
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-tuning on cultural data improve figurative language understanding, and vice versa? We conduct a systematic study across four models (ALLaM-7B, Fanar-1-9B, Qwen3-8B, Llama-3.1-8B) and six Arabic datasets spanning cultural commonsense, proverbs, and poetry across diverse dialects and regions. Fine-tuning on poetry improves idiom comprehension (+2.33%, p<0.05), a gain our ArabicMMLU control does not reproduce, indicating that it stems from figurative content rather than Arabic language adaptation and pointing to a sen...
| Authors | Mena Attia, Mona Diab, Thamar Solorio |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 18 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 18 August 2026 |
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