@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://aclanthology.org/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."
}<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="balestrucci-etal-2025-towards">
<titleInfo>
<title>Towards a Perspectivist Understanding of Irony through Rhetorical Figures</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Pier</namePart>
<namePart type="given">Felice</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Balestrucci</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Michael</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Oliverio</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Elisa</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Chierchiello</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Eliana</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Di Palma</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Luca</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Anselma</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Valerio</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Basile</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Cristina</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Bosco</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Alessandro</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Mazzei</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Viviana</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Patti</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2025-11</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the The 4th Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Gavin</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Abercrombie</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Valerio</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Basile</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Simona</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Frenda</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Sara</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Tonelli</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Shiran</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Dudy</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Suzhou, China</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
<identifier type="isbn">979-8-89176-350-0</identifier>
</relatedItem>
<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.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">balestrucci-etal-2025-towards</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2025.nlperspectives-1.3/</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2025-11</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>27</start>
<end>36</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Towards a Perspectivist Understanding of Irony through Rhetorical Figures
%A Balestrucci, Pier Felice
%A Oliverio, Michael
%A Chierchiello, Elisa
%A Di Palma, Eliana
%A Anselma, Luca
%A Basile, Valerio
%A Bosco, Cristina
%A Mazzei, Alessandro
%A Patti, Viviana
%Y Abercrombie, Gavin
%Y Basile, Valerio
%Y Frenda, Simona
%Y Tonelli, Sara
%Y Dudy, Shiran
%S Proceedings of the The 4th Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP
%D 2025
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Suzhou, China
%@ 979-8-89176-350-0
%F balestrucci-etal-2025-towards
%X 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.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.nlperspectives-1.3/
%P 27-36
Markdown (Informal)
[Towards a Perspectivist Understanding of Irony through Rhetorical Figures](https://aclanthology.org/2025.nlperspectives-1.3/) (Balestrucci et al., NLPerspectives 2025)
ACL
- Pier Felice Balestrucci, Michael Oliverio, Elisa Chierchiello, Eliana Di Palma, Luca Anselma, Valerio Basile, Cristina Bosco, Alessandro Mazzei, and Viviana Patti. 2025. Towards a Perspectivist Understanding of Irony through Rhetorical Figures. In Proceedings of the The 4th Workshop on Perspectivist Approaches to NLP, pages 27–36, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.