Agnese Daffara


2025

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Fine-grained Fallacy Detection with Human Label Variation
Alan Ramponi | Agnese Daffara | Sara Tonelli
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We introduce FAINA, the first dataset for fallacy detection that embraces multiple plausible answers and natural disagreement. FAINA includes over 11K span-level annotations with overlaps across 20 fallacy types on social media posts in Italian about migration, climate change, and public health given by two expert annotators. Through an extensive annotation study that allowed discussion over multiple rounds, we minimize annotation errors whilst keeping signals of human label variation. Moreover, we devise a framework that goes beyond “single ground truth” evaluation and simultaneously accounts for multiple (equally reliable) test sets and the peculiarities of the task, i.e., partial span matches, overlaps, and the varying severity of labeling errors. Our experiments across four fallacy detection setups show that multi-task and multi-label transformer-based approaches are strong baselines across all settings. We release our data, code, and annotation guidelines to foster research on fallacy detection and human label variation more broadly.

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Generalizability of Media Frames: Corpus creation and analysis across countries
Agnese Daffara | Sourabh Dattawad | Sebastian Padó | Tanise Ceron
Proceedings of the 14th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2025)

Frames capture aspects of an issue that are emphasized in a debate by interlocutors and can help us understand how political language conveys different perspectives and ultimately shapes people’s opinions. The Media Frame Corpus (MFC) is the most commonly used framework with categories and detailed guidelines for operationalizing frames. It is, however, focused on a few salient U.S. news issues, making it unclear how well these frames can capture news issues in other cultural contexts. To explore this, we introduce FrameNews-PT, a dataset of Brazilian Portuguese news articles covering political and economic news and annotate it within the MFC framework.Through several annotation rounds, we evaluate the extent to which MFC frames generalize to the Brazilian debate issues. We further evaluate how fine-tuned and zero-shot models perform on out-of-domain data.Results show that the 15 MFC frames remain broadly applicable with minor revisions of the guidelines. However, some MFC frames are rarely used, and novel news issues are analyzed using general ‘fallback’ frames. We conclude that cross-cultural frame use requires careful consideration.

2023

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Towards an Italian Corpus for Implicit Object Completion
Agnese Daffara | Elisabetta Jezek
Proceedings of the Ninth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2023)