English

NormGenesis: Multicultural Dialogue Generation via Exemplar-Guided Social Norm Modeling and Violation Recovery

Computation and Language 2026-03-13 v2

Abstract

Social norms govern culturally appropriate behavior in communication, enabling dialogue systems to produce responses that are not only coherent but also socially acceptable. We present NormGenesis, a multicultural framework for generating and annotating socially grounded dialogues across English, Chinese, and Korean. To model the dynamics of social interaction beyond static norm classification, we propose a novel dialogue type, Violation-to-Resolution (V2R), which models the progression of conversations following norm violations through recognition and socially appropriate repair. To improve pragmatic consistency in underrepresented languages, we implement an exemplar-based iterative refinement early in the dialogue synthesis process. This design introduces alignment with linguistic, emotional, and sociocultural expectations before full dialogue generation begins. Using this framework, we construct a dataset of 10,800 multi-turn dialogues annotated at the turn level for norm adherence, speaker intent, and emotional response. Human and LLM-based evaluations demonstrate that NormGenesis significantly outperforms existing datasets in refinement quality, dialogue naturalness, and generalization performance. We show that models trained on our V2R-augmented data exhibit improved pragmatic competence in ethically sensitive contexts. Our work establishes a new benchmark for culturally adaptive dialogue modeling and provides a scalable methodology for norm-aware generation across linguistically and culturally diverse languages.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.18395,
  title  = {NormGenesis: Multicultural Dialogue Generation via Exemplar-Guided Social Norm Modeling and Violation Recovery},
  author = {Minki Hong and Jangho Choi and Jihie Kim},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.18395},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

39 pages, 17 figures, EMNLP 2025 Main Conference, Senior Area Chair (SAC) Highlights Award