Textual Entailment Recognition (TER) aims to predict whether a pair of premise-hypothesis sentences represents an entailment, a contradiction, or none of the above. Addressing TER in the presence of figurative language is particularly challenging because words are used in a way that deviates from the conventional order and meaning. In this work, we investigate the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to address TER and generate textual explanations of TER predictions. First, we evaluate LLM performance in Zero- and Few-Shot Learning settings, with and without using Chain-of-Thought prompting. After identifying the best prompts, we highlight the settings in which in-context learning is beneficial. The closed-source models GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4o show unexpected limitations compared to significantly smaller open-source LLMs. Next, we thoroughly analyze the effect of LLM Fine-Tuning, showing substantial improvements in the quality of TER explanations compared to Zero- and Few-Shot Learning. Notably, 9 billion parameter open-source LLMs demonstrate again competitive performance against larger closed-source models. Finally, we compare our LLM-based approach with the state-of-the-art DREAM-FLUTE and Cross-Task architectures. The results show significant performance improvements, particularly in the quality of the generated explanations.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across various tasks. However, current training approaches combine standard cross-entropy loss with extensive data, human feedback, or ad hoc methods to enhance performance. These solutions are often not scalable or feasible due to their associated costs, complexity, or resource requirements. This study investigates the use of established semantic segmentation loss functions in natural language generation to create a versatile, practical, and scalable solution for fine-tuning different architectures. We evaluate their effectiveness in solving Math Word Problems and question answering across different models of varying sizes. For the analyzed tasks, we found that the traditional Cross-Entropy loss represents a sub-optimal choice, while models trained to minimize alternative (task-dependent) losses, such as Focal or Lovász, achieve a mean improvement of +36% on exact match without requiring additional data or human feedback. These findings suggest a promising pathway for more efficient and accessible training processes.

In the banking and finance sectors, members of the business units focused on Trend and Risk Analysis daily process internal and external visually-rich documents including text, images, and tables. Given a facet (i.e., topic) of interest, they are particularly interested in retrieving the top trending keywords related to it and then use them to annotate the most relevant document elements (e.g., text paragraphs, images or tables). In this paper, we explore the use of both open-source and proprietary Large Language Models to automatically generate lists of facet-relevant keywords, automatically produce free-text descriptions of both keywords and multimedia document content, and then annotate documents by leveraging textual similarity approaches. The preliminary results, achieved on English and Italian documents, show that OpenAI GPT-4 achieves superior performance in keyword description generation and multimedia content annotation, while the open-source Meta AI Llama2 model turns out to be highly competitive in generating additional keywords.