Toward Cultural Alignment: Human-Centered Evaluation of Multimodal AI Stories Across Five African Communities
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2608.29209 (cs)
[Submitted on 29 Aug 2026]
Title:Toward Cultural Alignment: Human-Centered Evaluation of Multimodal AI Stories Across Five African Communities
Authors:Millicent Ochieng, Felermino D. M. A. Ali, Elizabeth A. Ankrah, Najeeb Gambo Abdulhamid, Migisha Boyd, Stephanie Nyairo, Mercy Muchai, Samuel Chege Maina, Aditya Vashistha, Anja Thieme, Jacki O'Neill
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Abstract:In this paper, we examine how well AI-generated multimodal stories align with the lived practices, relationships, language, values, and visual expectations of the communities they represent. We conduct a community-grounded mixed-methods evaluation with 19 culture representatives across five African communities, combining quantitative annotations with qualitative focus group discussions. We find that cultural alignment depends not simply on recognizable cultural markers, but on how those markers fit social, linguistic, procedural, and visual context. From these evaluations, we develop a taxonomy of cultural alignment comprising five broader cultural marker categories and eight recurring mechanisms of misalignment. We additionally evaluate five multimodal LLM judges to examine whether automated evaluation can approximate community-grounded judgments at scale. Judge reliability and score calibration vary substantially across communities, with no single judge performing consistently across all five settings. These findings motivate community-calibrated evaluation pipelines in which automated judges are validated against community judgments to determine where they can be trusted and where human review remains necessary.
| Comments: | Accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2026 |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.29209 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2608.29209v1 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.29209
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Submission history
From: Millicent Ochieng [view email][v1] Sat, 29 Aug 2026 11:45:39 UTC (16,518 KB)
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