SEADialogues: A Multilingual Culturally Grounded Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset on Southeast Asian Languages

ACL ARR 2025 July Submission938 Authors

Abstract: 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 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.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Multilingualism and Cross-Lingual NLP

Research Area Keywords: multilingualism,multilingual benchmarks,multilingual evaluation,resources for less-resourced languages

Contribution Types: Data resources, Data analysis

Languages Studied: Indonesian, Javanese, Malay, Minangkabau, Tagalog, Tamil, Thai, Vietnamese

Submission Number: 938