🇮🇹 Paper accepted at CLiC-it 2026: Dromedario 3 🐪
-
Our paper, Dromedario 3: Localizing the Tülu 3 Dataset to Italian, has been accepted at CLiC-it Conference 2026!
👏 Huge thanks to my co-authors Marina Iuliana Aur, Francesco Ortame, Luca Moroni, Alberte Fernández-Castro, Elena Marafatto and Roberto Navigli.
Abstract
Despite growing interest in supervised fine-tuning (SFT) datasets, nearly all existing resources are English-only or English-dominated, leaving Italian without a comparable resource. To bridge this gap, we introduce Dromedario 3, a large-scale Italian instruction-following dataset of approximately 630K translated instruction-response pairs derived from the Tülu 3 SFT mixture. Rather than translating the entire mixture, we first apply a multi-stage filtering pipeline. Specifically, we combine source-dataset filtering with automatic task and domain classification based on the Super-NaturalInstructions taxonomy to exclude language-bound tasks, while existing non-English instances are retained untranslated to preserve multilingual diversity. The selected instances are translated using TranslateGemma-27B and post-processed to remove faulty outputs. Manual validation confirms the reliability of both the automatic classification (accuracy above 87% for task labels and 95% for domain labels) and the machine translations (correctness above 95%). We further conduct a mixing study evaluating five SFT recipes with varying Italian-to-English compositions on parallel Italian and English benchmarks using two models, Llama 3.1 8B and Minerva 7B. The model with stronger Italian pretraining benefits substantially from Italian SFT data in generative settings, while recipes combining both languages offer the most robust trade-off between gains in Italian and preservation of English capabilities.
See you in Palermo! 🇮🇹
⚠️ Proceedings to be published soon.
Dromedario 3
Dromedario 3 is a large-scale Italian instruction-tuning dataset built from the Tülu 3 SFT mixture through a documented pipeline of taxonomy-based filtering, translation, and post-translation quality control. We validate Dromedario 3 training two models, Minerva 7B and Llama 3 8B on different recipes, and we found that Italian SFT improves the performance of models with stronger Italian pretraining of up to 30% compared to the original Tülu 3 mixture.
This result suggests that language-specific SFT data matters; in this context, translated English data of silver quality is a first step toward building more capable Italian models.
Citations
If you found our work valuable, please cite it as:
-
Plain text
Luca Gioffré, Marina Iuliana Aur, Francesco Ortame, Luca Moroni, Alberte Fernández-Castro, Elena Marafatto, and Roberto Navigli. 2026. Dromedario 3: Localizing the Tülu 3 Dataset to Italian. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2026), Palermo, Italy.Markdown
Dromedario 3: Localizing the Tülu 3 Dataset to Italian (Gioffré et al., CLiC-it 2026)BibTeX
@inproceedings{gioffre-2026-dromedario3, title = {Dromedario 3: Localizing the T{\"u}lu 3 Dataset to Italian}, author = {Gioffr{\'e}, Luca and Aur, Marina Iuliana and Ortame, Francesco and Moroni, Luca and Fern{\'a}ndez-Castro, Alberte and Marafatto, Elena and Navigli, Roberto}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Twelfth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-it 2026)}, editor = {Basile, Valerio and Croce, Danilo and Passaro, Lucia C. and Pirrone, Roberto}, year = {2026}, address = {Palermo, Italy}, month = sep }