The main goal of this work is the creation of the Italian version of the WebNLG corpus through the application of Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and post-editing with hand-written rules. To achieve this goal, in a first step, several existing NMT models were analysed and compared in order to identify the system with the highest performance on the original corpus. In a second step, after using the best NMT system, we semi-automatically designed and applied a number of rules to refine and improve the quality of the produced resource, creating a new corpus named WebNLG-IT. We used this resource for fine-tuning several LLMs for RDF-to-text tasks. In this way, comparing the performance of LLM-based generators on both Italian and English, we have (1) evaluated the quality of WebNLG-IT with respect to the original English version, (2) released the first fine-tuned LLM-based system for generating Italian from semantic web triples and (3) introduced an Italian version of a modular generation pipeline for RDF-to-text.

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.

This paper describes the DipInfo-UniTo system participating to the GEM shared task 2024. We participate only to the Data-to-Text (D2T) task. The DipInfo-UniTo system is based on Mistral (Jiang et al., 2023), a recent Large Language Model (LLM). Most LLMs are capable of generating high-quality text for D2T tasks but, crucially, they often fall short in terms of adequacy, and sometimes exhibit “hallucinations”. To mitigate this issue, we have implemented a generation pipeline that combines LLMs with techniques from the traditional Natural Language Generation (NLG) pipeline. In particular, we have a three step process SGA, consisting in (1) Splitting the original set of triples, (2) Generating verbalizations from the resulting split data units, (3) Aggregating the verbalizations produced in the previous step.