We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof
2025/09/01 by Nikta Gohari Sadr, Sadr, Nikta Gohari, Sahar Heidariasl +7 · 11 voices · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Computer Science · #Language and cultural evolution #Topic Modeling #Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2509.01035
Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) struggle to navigate culturally specific communication norms, limiting their effectiveness in global contexts. We focus on Persian taarof, a social norm in Iranian interactions, which is a sophisticated system of ritual politeness that emphasizes deference, modesty, and indirectness, yet remains absent from existing cultural benchmarks. We introduce TaarofBench, the first benchmark for evaluating LLM understanding of taarof, comprising 450 role-play scenarios covering 12 common social interaction topics, validated by native speakers. Our evaluation of five frontier LLMs reveals substantial gaps in cultural competence, with accuracy rates 40-48% below native speakers when taarof is culturally appropriate. Performance varies between interaction topics, improves with Persian-language prompts, and exhibits gender-based asymmetries. We also show that responses rated "polite" by standard metrics often violate taarof norms, indicating the limitations of Western politeness frameworks. Through supervised fine-tuning and Direct Preference Optimization, we achieve 21.8% and 42.3% improvement in model alignment with cultural expectations. Our human study with 33 participants (11 native Persian, 11 heritage, and 11 non-Iranian speakers) forms baselines in varying degrees of familiarity with Persian norms. This work lays the foundation for developing diverse and culturally aware LLMs, enabling applications that better navigate complex social interactions.
Cited by
Discussions
- We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof [hn, 181 points, 122 comments]
- I’ve been doing a cultural competency paper and this is clearly the frontier task. One time a Persian gym buddy insisted so hard that they actually preferred sleeping on the floor that, rather than he [bsky, 32 points, 1 comments]
- AI chatbots often can't read between the lines and commit cultural cringe that even tourists in Italy ordering coffee in the afternoon couldn't manage [lemmy, 4 points, 1 comments]
- I love this. Do current LLMs do well in 'non-Western' social norms? As tried with Persian Taroof! They do not do well. But you can fine-tune them somewhat to do better! arxiv.org/abs/2509.01035 [bsky, 2 points, 0 comments]
- We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01035 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01035 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45327964) [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof https:// arxiv.org/abs/2509.01035 # arxiv # llm [mastodon, 0 points, 0 comments]
- LLMs at the moment are not particularly culturally attuned. This paper introduces a benchmark to measure how they do in the Iranian art of Taarof - a form of ritual politeness. arxiv.org/abs/2509.0103 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01035 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45327964) [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45327964 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
Related