IPHS 300: AI for Humanity
Document Type
Poster
Publication Date
Spring 2026
Abstract
As a Vietnamese international student studying in the US, I grew up learning one version of the Vietnam War -or, as we call it in Vietnamese, the American War -in Vietnamese history classes, only to encounter different perspectives in American college classrooms. Taking Chinese language courses and spending a semester abroad in China sharpened this further as the same historical events looked different again through Chinese sources. These experiences made me aware of how language shapes the way information and historical knowledge get presented and understood. Since LLMs are trained on data reflecting many cultures and languages, I wanted to see whether prompting them in English, Vietnamese, or Chinese Mandarin would produce meaningfully different responses to highly contested questions about the Vietnam War. This project tests four models -Grok 4, GPT-5.5, Claude Opus 4.7, and DeepSeekV4 -on the same four contested questions across three languages (48 total responses) to examine cross-lingual consistency and nationalistic framing biases.
Recommended Citation
Vu, Melissa, "Whose Vietnam War? How LLMs Answer Contested History in Three Languages" (2026). IPHS 300: AI for Humanity. Paper 66.
https://digital.kenyon.edu/dh_iphs_ai/66
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.