Andrea Zaninello

Malvina Nissim, Danilo Croce, Viviana Patti et al.

The rapid progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed natural language processing and broadened its impact across research and society. Yet, systematic evaluation of these models, especially for languages beyond English, remains limited. "Challenging the Abilities of LAnguage Models in ITAlian" (CALAMITA) is a large-scale collaborative benchmarking initiative for Italian, coordinated under the Italian Association for Computational Linguistics. Unlike existing efforts that focus on leaderboards, CALAMITA foregrounds methodology: it federates more than 80 contributors from academia, industry, and the public sector to design, document, and evaluate a diverse collection of tasks, covering linguistic competence, commonsense reasoning, factual consistency, fairness, summarization, translation, and code generation. Through this process, we not only assembled a benchmark of over 20 tasks and almost 100 subtasks, but also established a centralized evaluation pipeline that supports heterogeneous datasets and metrics. We report results for four open-weight LLMs, highlighting systematic strengths and weaknesses across abilities, as well as challenges in task-specific evaluation. Beyond quantitative results, CALAMITA exposes methodological lessons: the necessity of fine-grained, task-representative metrics, the importance of harmonized pipelines, and the benefits and limitations of broad community engagement. CALAMITA is conceived as a rolling benchmark, enabling continuous integration of new tasks and models. This makes it both a resource -- the most comprehensive and diverse benchmark for Italian to date -- and a framework for sustainable, community-driven evaluation. We argue that this combination offers a blueprint for other languages and communities seeking inclusive and rigorous LLM evaluation practices.

Iker García-Ferrero, Rodrigo Agerri, Aitziber Atutxa Salazar et al.

Research on language technology for the development of medical applications is currently a hot topic in Natural Language Understanding and Generation. Thus, a number of large language models (LLMs) have recently been adapted to the medical domain, so that they can be used as a tool for mediating in human-AI interaction. While these LLMs display competitive performance on automated medical texts benchmarks, they have been pre-trained and evaluated with a focus on a single language (English mostly). This is particularly true of text-to-text models, which typically require large amounts of domain-specific pre-training data, often not easily accessible for many languages. In this paper, we address these shortcomings by compiling, to the best of our knowledge, the largest multilingual corpus for the medical domain in four languages, namely English, French, Italian and Spanish. This new corpus has been used to train Medical mT5, the first open-source text-to-text multilingual model for the medical domain. Additionally, we present two new evaluation benchmarks for all four languages with the aim of facilitating multilingual research in this domain. A comprehensive evaluation shows that Medical mT5 outperforms both encoders and similarly sized text-to-text models for the Spanish, French, and Italian benchmarks, while being competitive with current state-of-the-art LLMs in English.

Tiziano Labruna, Sofia Brenna, Andrea Zaninello et al.

Large pre-trained language models have exhibited unprecedented capabilities in producing high-quality text via prompting techniques. This fact introduces new possibilities for data collection and annotation, particularly in situations where such data is scarce, complex to gather, expensive, or even sensitive. In this paper, we explore the potential of these models to generate and annotate goal-oriented dialogues, and conduct an in-depth analysis to evaluate their quality. Our experiments employ ChatGPT, and encompass three categories of goal-oriented dialogues (task-oriented, collaborative, and explanatory), two generation modes (interactive and one-shot), and two languages (English and Italian). Based on extensive human-based evaluations, we demonstrate that the quality of generated dialogues and annotations is on par with those generated by humans.

Marco Del Tredici, Malvina Nissim, Andrea Zaninello

From a diachronic corpus of Italian, we build consecutive vector spaces in time and use them to compare a term's cosine similarity to itself in different time spans. We assume that a drop in similarity might be related to the emergence of a metaphorical sense at a given time. Similarity-based observations are matched to the actual year when a figurative meaning was documented in a reference dictionary and through manual inspection of corpus occurrences.