Past work in computational sarcasm deals primarily with sarcasm detection. In this paper, we introduce a novel, related problem: sarcasm target identification (, extracting the target of ridicule in a sarcastic sentence). We present an introductory approach for sarcasm target identification. Our approach employs two types of extractors: one based on rules, and another consisting of a statistical classifier. To compare our approach, we use two baselines: a na "ive baseline and another baseline based on work in sentiment target identification. We perform our experiments on book snippets and tweets, and show that our hybrid approach performs better than the two baselines and also, in comparison with using the two extractors individually. Our introductory approach establishes the viability of sarcasm target identification, and will serve as a baseline for future work.
Related to sarcasm target identification is sentiment target identification. Sentiment target identification deals with identifying the entity towards which sentiment is expressed in a sentence. present an approach to extract opinion words and targets collectively from a dataset. Aspect identification for sentiment has also been studied. This deals with extracting aspects of an entity (for example, color, weight, battery in case of a cell phone). Probabilistic topic models have been commonly used for the same. present a probabilistic topic model that jointly estimates sentiment and aspect in order to achieve sentiment summarization. perform multi-aspect sentiment analysis using a topic model. Several other topic model-based approaches to aspect extraction have been reported @cite_16 . To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work that deals with sarcasm target identification.
@cite_16
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Sarcasm detection is a key task for many natural language processing tasks. In sentiment analysis, for example, sarcasm can flip the polarity of an "apparently positive" sentence and, hence, negatively affect polarity detection performance. To date, most approaches to sarcasm detection have treated the task primarily as a text categorization problem. Sarcasm, however, can be expressed in very subtle ways and requires a deeper understanding of natural language that standard text categorization techniques cannot grasp. In this work, we develop models based on a pre-trained convolutional neural network for extracting sentiment, emotion and personality features for sarcasm detection. Such features, along with the network's baseline features, allow the proposed models to outperform the state of the art on benchmark datasets. We also address the often ignored generalizability issue of classifying data that have not been seen by the models at learning phase.