  To enhance language models' cultural awareness, we design a generalizable
pipeline to construct cultural knowledge bases from different online
communities on a massive scale. With the pipeline, we construct CultureBank, a
knowledge base built upon users' self-narratives with 12K cultural descriptors
sourced from TikTok and 11K from Reddit. Unlike previous cultural knowledge
resources, CultureBank contains diverse views on cultural descriptors to allow
flexible interpretation of cultural knowledge, and contextualized cultural
scenarios to help grounded evaluation. With CultureBank, we evaluate different
LLMs' cultural awareness, and identify areas for improvement. We also fine-tune
a language model on CultureBank: experiments show that it achieves better
performances on two downstream cultural tasks in a zero-shot setting. Finally,
we offer recommendations based on our findings for future culturally aware
language technologies. The project page is https://culturebank.github.io . The
code and model is at https://github.com/SALT-NLP/CultureBank . The released
CultureBank dataset is at https://huggingface.co/datasets/SALT-NLP/CultureBank .
