Culture is Not Trivia: Sociocultural Theory for Cultural NLP

The field of cultural NLP has recently experienced rapid growth, driven by a pressing need to ensure that language technologies are effective and safe across a pluralistic user base. This work has largely progressed without a shared conception of culture, instead choosing to rely on a wide array of cultural proxies. However, this leads to a number of recurring limitations: coarse national boundaries fail to capture nuanced differences that lay within them, limited coverage restricts datasets to only a subset of usually highly-represented cultures, and a lack of dynamicity results in static cultural benchmarks that do not change as culture evolves. In this position paper, we argue that these methodological limitations are symptomatic of a theoretical gap. We draw on a well-developed theory of culture from sociocultural linguistics to fill this gap by 1) demonstrating in a case study how it can clarify methodological constraints and affordances, 2) offering theoretically-motivated paths forward to achieving cultural competence, and 3) arguing that localization is a more useful framing for the goals of much current work in cultural NLP.