NormDial: A Comparable Bilingual Synthetic Dialog Dataset for Modeling Social Norm Adherence and Violation

Abstract: Social norms fundamentally shape interpersonal communication. We present NormDial, a high-quality dyadic dialogue dataset with turn-by-turn annotations of social norm adherences and violations for Chinese and American cultures. Introducing the task of social norm observance detection, our dataset is synthetically generated in both Chinese and English using a human-in-the-loop pipeline by prompting LLMs with a small collection of expert-annotated social norms. We show that our generated dialogues are of high quality through human evaluation and further evaluate the performance of existing LLMs on this task. Our findings point towards new directions for understanding the nuances of social norms as they manifest in conversational contexts that span across languages and cultures.