@inproceedings{balestrucci-etal-2025-towards,
    title = "Towards a Perspectivist Understanding of Irony through Rhetorical Figures",
    author = "Balestrucci, Pier Felice  and
      Oliverio, Michael  and
      Chierchiello, Elisa  and
      Di Palma, Eliana  and
      Anselma, Luca  and
      Basile, Valerio  and
      Bosco, Cristina  and
      Mazzei, Alessandro  and
      Patti, Viviana",
    editor = "Abercrombie, Gavin  and
      Basile, Valerio  and
      Frenda, Simona  and
      Tonelli, Sara  and
      Dudy, Shiran",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the The 4th Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.nlperspectives-1.3/",
    pages = "27--36",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-350-0",
    abstract = "Irony is a subjective and pragmatically complex phenomenon, often conveyed through rhetorical figures and interpreted differently across individuals. In this study, we adopt a perspectivist approach, accounting for the socio-demographic background of annotators, to investigate whether specific rhetorical strategies promote a shared perception of irony within demographic groups, and whether Large Language Models (LLMs) reflect specific perspectives. Focusing on the Italian subset of the perspectivist MultiPICo dataset, we manually annotate rhetorical figures in ironic replies using a linguistically grounded taxonomy. The annotation is carried out by expert annotators balanced by generation and gender, enabling us to analyze inter-group agreement and polarization. Our results show that some rhetorical figures lead to higher levels of agreement, suggesting that certain rhetorical strategies are more effective in promoting a shared perception of irony. We fine-tune multilingual LLMs for rhetorical figure classification, and evaluate whether their outputs align with different demographic perspectives. Results reveal that models show varying degrees of alignment with specific groups, reflecting potential perspectivist behavior in model predictions. These findings highlight the role of rhetorical figures in structuring irony perception and underscore the importance of socio-demographics in both annotation and model evaluation."
}