A multilingual model can still miss the culture

Cohere’s Culture Funnel research examines cultural representation across stages of model training. The researchers argue that multilingual capability does not ensure sensitivity to local norms and contexts, and that post-training data can lose substantial cultural diversity.

Context

Translation alone cannot supply missing context. A fluent response may still assume the wrong social conventions or overlook regional experience. This makes dataset composition part of the evaluation question: which perspectives are represented, which are filtered out, and how are culturally specific answers assessed by the people concerned?