Lyle Ungar Visits WING to Give Invited NAII Seminar on Evaluating LLMs for Cross-Cultural Coaching and Therapy

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:00:00 +0800

Did you miss Lyle Ungar’s NUS AI Institute seminar on evaluating large language models for cross-cultural coaching and therapy?

Watch the recording to learn how frontier LLMs still struggle with culturally appropriate conversation and what can be done about it.

Lyle Ungar (University of Pennsylvania) explores how to evaluate LLMs on subjective tasks like coaching and therapy across cultures. The talk highlights:

An interpretable framework for comparing linguistic politeness cues across languages
Evidence that LLMs can homogenize non-Western styles toward stylistic neutrality, a failure missed by standard metrics
RASTA, a retrieval-based method that preserves culturally appropriate style without hurting content
The Culturally-Aware Conversations benchmark

Lyle Ungar is Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, with cross-appointments in Psychology, Bioengineering, Genomics & Computational Biology, and Operations, Information & Decisions. His group builds explainable NLP and socio-emotionally sensitive AI for psychological and medical research.

This NUS AI Institute seminar was recorded and rebroadcast with explicit permission from Lyle Ungar.

Recording: Watch the seminar

AI | Web IR NLP Group @ NUS

Lyle Ungar Visits WING to Give Invited NAII Seminar on Evaluating LLMs for Cross-Cultural Coaching and Therapy