When English Rewrites Local Knowledge C

AI benchmark · General Knowledge

Publisher
Paper Arxiv
Tier
C why
Snapshot

Full listing name: When English Rewrites Local Knowledge: Global Narrative Dominance in Large Language Models

What is When English Rewrites Local Knowledge?

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used as cross-lingual knowledge interfaces. However, culturally grounded questions often reflect globally dominant narratives rather than local contexts. We study this failure mode as \textit{global narrative dominance} in Bangla, a low-resource cultural context. We introduce \texttt{CulturalNB}, a dataset of 717 manually curated Bengali cultural instances with parallel Bangla--English question--answer pairs and supporting evidence, metadata, and sociocultural annotations. Using question-only and evidence-based prompting, we evaluate nine state-of-the-art LLMs with human and two independent LLM judges across metrics for cross-lingual consistency, language anchoring, global substitution, institutional bias, and epistemic perspective coverage. Results show that questions asked in English systematically increase global substitution and institutional framing while reducing local perspective coverage. Local evidence improves factual consistency and perspective coverage, but does not eliminate language-induced epistemic shifts. These findings suggest that cultural failures in LLMs are not only missing-knowledge errors but also failures of grounding and narrative prioritization.

Tier C · a leaderboard, listed apart

C

Niche: a handful of models scored, or built by an RL vendor.

How much stands behind a tier: usage, who backs it, a confirmed line from its own site or paper, and a clear read on X. High with three of the four, medium with two, low otherwise.

  • 9 models scored
  • in curated RL directories (1 pt)
How we got to tier C
  1. Adoption: 9 models scored. Tier C.
  2. Not yet read on X.
  3. In curated RL directories: 1 point, a floor of none.
  4. Not yet confirmed by a line from its own site or paper.
  5. Judged a leaderboard, arena or index rather than one benchmark (or not a benchmark at all): listed apart.

A clear view on X moves a tier one step up or down; most entries don't move. How tiers work.

Not on the map yet: no line from its own site or paper places it in a domain.

Next: browse all benchmarks. Entry from the RL Research daily scrape of public sources, 2026-10-11 snapshot.