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A Multi-layered Approach to Physical Commonsense Understanding: Creation and Evaluation of an Italian Dataset

In this paper, we explore physical commonsense reasoning of large language models (LLMs) and propose a specific methodology to evaluate low-level understanding of the physical world. Specifically, the goal is to create a test set to analyze physical commonsense reasoning in large language models for Italian and focus on a trustworthy analysis of the results. To that end, we present a tiered Italian dataset, called Graded Italian Annotated dataset (GITA), written and thoroughly annotated by a professional linguist, which allows us to concentrate on three different levels of commonsense understanding. Moreover, we create a semi-automated system to complete the accurate annotation of the dataset. We also validate our dataset by carrying out three tasks with a multilingual model (XLM-RoBERTa) and propose a qualitative analysis of the results. We found out that, although the model may perform at high-level classification tasks, its easoning is inconsistent and unverifiable, since it does not capture intermediate evidence.