Cultural reasoning
Studying whether multilingual language models can reason about culturally specific knowledge and explain their answers in context.
Research programme
Cultural Adaptation in NLP
Research on culturally grounded language models, multilingual cultural reasoning, and human-aligned evaluation.
This programme asks how language models can move beyond linguistic fluency towards reliable understanding and generation that reflects cultural context. A related question is whether automated evaluation can reliably recognise that cultural grounding.
Research
Evaluation reliability
Comparing automated judges with human assessment, with particular attention to the difference between structurally observable and culturally interpretive dimensions.
Arabic and multilingual NLP
Developing and evaluating models for Arabic and other multilingual settings where cultural and linguistic adaptation matters.
Current work
CRaFT: An Explanation-Based Framework for Evaluating Cultural Reasoning in Multilingual Language Models
Shehenaz Hossain · Haithem Afli
ACL Anthology ↗Structural vs Cultural Reasoning: Reliability Limits of LLM-as-a-Judge in Multilingual Evaluation
Shehenaz Hossain · Houda Bouamor · Haithem Afli
Research summary ↗ADAPT–MTU HAI at PalmX 2025: Leveraging Full and Parameter-Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning for Arabic Cultural QA
Shehenaz Hossain · Haithem Afli
ACL Anthology ↗Selected publications
- 2026Structural vs Cultural Reasoning: Reliability Limits of LLM-as-a-Judge in Multilingual Evaluation
Shehenaz Hossain · Houda Bouamor · Haithem Afli · AACL 2026
Study page ↗ - 2026CRaFT: An Explanation-Based Framework for Evaluating Cultural Reasoning in Multilingual Language Models
Shehenaz Hossain · Haithem Afli · LREC 2026 · pp. 5192–5202
Paper ↗ - 2025ADAPT–MTU HAI at PalmX 2025: Leveraging Full and Parameter-Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning for Arabic Cultural QA
Shehenaz Hossain · Haithem Afli · ArabicNLP 2025 · pp. 802–808
Paper ↗
Related research
Beyond the Benchmark — dynamic and distribution-based evaluation in NLP.
Dr Haithem Afli — Academic Website — research, publications, projects and academic profile.