SEADialogues: A Multilingual Culturally Grounded Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset on Southeast Asian Languages
This addresses the problem of cultural oversight in dialogue systems for Southeast Asia, though it is incremental as it builds on existing dataset efforts.
The authors tackled the lack of cultural nuance in dialogue datasets by introducing SEADialogues, a multilingual dataset for Southeast Asian languages, which includes culturally grounded topics and persona attributes to enhance relevance.
Although numerous datasets have been developed to support dialogue systems, most existing chit-chat datasets overlook the cultural nuances inherent in natural human conversations. To address this gap, we introduce SEADialogues, a culturally grounded dialogue dataset centered on Southeast Asia, a region with over 700 million people and immense cultural diversity. Our dataset features dialogues in eight languages from six Southeast Asian countries, many of which are low-resource despite having sizable speaker populations. To enhance cultural relevance and personalization, each dialogue includes persona attributes and two culturally grounded topics that reflect everyday life in the respective communities. Furthermore, we release a multi-turn dialogue dataset to advance research on culturally aware and human-centric large language models, including conversational dialogue agents.