Sustainable Italian LLM Evaluation: Community Perspectives and Methodological Guidelines

The evaluation of large language models for Italian faces unique challenges due to morphosyntactic complexity, dialectal variation, cultural-specific knowledge, and limited availability of computational resources. This position paper presents a comprehensive framework for Italian LLM benchmarking, in which we identify key dimensions for LLM evaluation, including linguistic capabilities, knowledge domains, task types and prompt variations, proposing high-level methodological guidelines for current and future initiatives. We advocate a community-driven, sustainable benchmarking initiative that incorporates dynamic dataset management, open model prioritization, and collaborative infrastructure utilization. Our framework aims to establish a coordinated effort within the Italian NLP community to ensure rigorous, scientifically sound evaluation practices that can adapt to the evolving landscape of Italian LLMs.