ITALIC: An Italian Culture-Aware Natural Language Benchmark

AbstractWe present ITALIC, a large-scale benchmark dataset of 10,000 multiple-choice questions designed to evaluate the natural language understanding of the Italian language and culture. ITALIC spans 12 domains, exploiting public tests to score domain experts in real-world scenarios. We detail our data collection process, stratification techniques, and selection strategies. ITALIC provides a comprehensive assessment suite that captures commonsense reasoning and linguistic proficiency in a morphologically rich language. We establish baseline performances using 17 state-of-the-art LLMs, revealing current limitations in Italian language understanding and highlighting significant linguistic complexity and cultural specificity challenges. ITALIC serves as a benchmark for evaluating existing models and as a roadmap for future research, encouraging the development of more sophisticated and culturally aware natural language systems.