Generating ironic content is challenging: it requires a nuanced understanding of context and implicit references and balancing seriousness and playfulness. Moreover, irony is highly subjective and can depend on various factors, such as social, cultural, or generational aspects. This paper explores whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can learn to generate ironic responses to social media posts. To do so, we fine-tune two models to generate ironic and non-ironic content and deeply analyze their outputs’ linguistic characteristics, their connection to the original post, and their similarity to the human-written replies. We also conduct a large-scale human evaluation of the outputs. Additionally, we investigate whether LLMs can learn a form of irony tied to a generational perspective, with mixed results.

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.

This paper describes a corpus consisting of real-world dialogues in English between users and a task-oriented conversational agent, with interactions revolving around the description of finite state automata. The creation of this corpus is part of a larger research project aimed at developing tools for an easier access to educational content, especially in STEM fields, for users with visual impairments. The development of this corpus was precisely motivated by the aim of providing a useful resource to support the design of such tools. The core feature of this corpus is that its creation involved both sighted and visually impaired participants, thus allowing for a greater diversity of perspectives and giving the opportunity to identify possible differences in the way the two groups of participants interacted with the agent. The paper introduces this corpus, giving an account of the process that led to its creation, i.e. the methodology followed to obtain the data, the annotation scheme adopted, and the analysis of the results. Finally, the paper reports the results of a classification experiment on the annotated corpus, and an additional experiment to assess the annotation capabilities of three large language models, in view of a further expansion of the corpus.