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

TL;DR

SEADialogues is a multilingual, culturally grounded dialogue dataset from Southeast Asia, designed to improve culturally aware conversational AI by including diverse languages, personas, and topics reflective of local communities.

Contribution

We introduce SEADialogues, a novel multi-language dataset with cultural context, persona attributes, and grounded topics, addressing the lack of culturally nuanced dialogue datasets.

Findings

Supports research on culturally aware dialogue systems

Includes low-resource languages from Southeast Asia

Enhances personalization in conversational AI

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 SEADialogues, 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.