This paper makes a simple increment to state-of-the-art in sarcasm detection research. Existing approaches are unable to capture subtle forms of context incongruity which lies at the heart of sarcasm. We explore if prior work can be enhanced using semantic similarity discordance between word embeddings. We augment word embedding-based features to four feature sets reported in the past. We also experiment with four types of word embeddings. We observe an improvement in sarcasm detection, irrespective of the word embedding used or the original feature set to which our features are augmented. For example, this augmentation results in an improvement in F-score of around 4 for three out of these four feature sets, and a minor degradation in case of the fourth, when Word2Vec embeddings are used. Finally, a comparison of the four embeddings shows that Word2Vec and dependency weight-based features outperform LSA and GloVe, in terms of their benefit to sarcasm detection.
Early sarcasm detection research focused on speech @cite_17 and lexical features @cite_15 . Several other features have been proposed @cite_15 @cite_14 @cite_16 @cite_10 @cite_12 @cite_1 @cite_7 @cite_2 @cite_11 @cite_5 @cite_6 . Of particular relevance to our work are papers that aim to first extract patterns relevant to sarcasm detection. use a semi-supervised approach that extracts sentiment-bearing patterns for sarcasm detection. extract phrases corresponding to implicit incongruity i.e. the situation where sentiment is expressed without use of sentiment words. describe a bootstrapping algorithm that iteratively discovers a set of positive verbs and negative situation phrases, which are later used in a sarcasm detection algorithm. also perform semi-supervised extraction of patterns for sarcasm detection. The only prior work which uses word embeddings for a related task of sarcasm detection is by . They model sarcasm detection as a word sense disambiguation task, and use embeddings to identify whether a word is used in the sarcastic or non-sarcastic sense. Two sense vectors for every word are created: one for literal sense and one for sarcastic sense. The final sense is determined based on the similarity of these sense vectors with the sentence vector.
@cite_14 @cite_11 @cite_7 @cite_1 @cite_6 @cite_2 @cite_5 @cite_15 @cite_16 @cite_10 @cite_12 @cite_17
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The relationship between context incongruity and sarcasm has been studied in linguistics. We present a computational system that harnesses context incongruity as a basis for sarcasm detection. Our statistical sarcasm classifiers incorporate two kinds of incongruity features: explicit and implicit. We show the benefit of our incongruity features for two text forms tweets and discussion forum posts. Our system also outperforms two past works (with Fscore improvement of 10-20 ). We also show how our features can capture intersentential incongruity. Irony is an effective but challenging mode of communication that allows a speaker to express sentiment-rich viewpoints with concision, sharpness and humour. Irony is especially common in online documents that express subjective and deeply-felt opinions, and thus represents a significant obstacle to the accurate analysis of sentiment in web texts. In this paper we look at one commonly used framing device for linguistic irony --the simile --to show how irony is often marked in ways that make it computationally feasible to detect. We conduct a very large corpus analysis of web-harvested similes to identify the most interesting characteristics of ironic comparisons, and provide an empirical evaluation of a new algorithm for separating ironic from non-ironic similes. Automatically detecting verbal irony (roughly, sarcasm) in online content is important for many practical applications (e.g., sentiment detection), but it is difficult. Previous approaches have relied predominantly on signal gleaned from word counts and grammatical cues. But such approaches fail to exploit the context in which comments are embedded. We thus propose a novel strategy for verbal irony classification that exploits contextual features, specifically by combining noun phrases and sentiment extracted from comments with the forum type (e.g., conservative or liberal) to which they were posted. We show that this approach improves verbal irony classification performance. Furthermore, because this method generates a very large feature space (and we expect predictive contextual features to be strong but few), we propose a mixed regularization strategy that places a sparsity-inducing 1 penalty on the contextual feature weights on top of the 2 penalty applied to all model coefficients. This increases model sparsity and reduces the variance of model performance. While a fair amount of work has been done on automatically detecting emotion in human speech, there has been little research on sarcasm detection. Although sarcastic speech acts are inherently subjective, humans have relatively clear intuitions as to what constitutes sarcastic speech. In this paper, we present a system for automatic sarcasm detection. Using a new acted speech corpus that is annotated for sarcastic and sincere speech, we examine a number of features that are indicative of sarcasm. The first set of features looks at a baseline of basic acoustic features that have been found to be helpful in human sarcasm identification. We then present an effective way of modeling and applying prosodic contours to the task of automatic sarcasm detection. This approach applies sequential modeling to categorical representations of pitch and intensity contours obtained via k-means clustering. Using a SimpleLogistic (LogitBoost) classifier, we are able to predict sarcasm with 81.57 accuracy. This result suggests that certain pitch and intensity contours are predictive of sarcastic speech. Irony is an important device in human communication, both in everyday spoken conversations as well as in written texts including books, websites, chats, reviews, and Twitter messages among others. Specific cases of irony and sarcasm have been studied in different contexts but, to the best of our knowledge, only recently the first publicly available corpus including annotations about whether a text is ironic or not has been published by Filatova (2012). However, no baseline for classification of ironic or sarcastic reviews has been provided. With this paper, we aim at closing this gap. We formulate the problem as a supervised classification task and evaluate different classifiers, reaching an F1-measure of up to 74 using logistic regression. We analyze the impact of a number of features which have been proposed in previous research as well as combinations of them. Automatically detecting verbal irony (roughly, sarcasm) is a challenging task because ironists say something other than ‐ and often opposite to ‐ what they actually mean. Discerning ironic intent exclusively from the words and syntax comprising texts (e.g., tweets, forum posts) is therefore not always possible: additional contextual information about the speaker and or the topic at hand is often necessary. We introduce a new corpus that provides empirical evidence for this claim. We show that annotators frequently require context to make judgements concerning ironic intent, and that machine learning approaches tend to misclassify those same comments for which annotators required additional context. Sarcasm transforms the polarity of an apparently positive or negative utterance into its opposite. We report on a method for constructing a corpus of sarcastic Twitter messages in which determination of the sarcasm of each message has been made by its author. We use this reliable corpus to compare sarcastic utterances in Twitter to utterances that express positive or negative attitudes without sarcasm. We investigate the impact of lexical and pragmatic factors on machine learning effectiveness for identifying sarcastic utterances and we compare the performance of machine learning techniques and human judges on this task. Perhaps unsurprisingly, neither the human judges nor the machine learning techniques perform very well. How do people know as much as they do with as little information as they get? The problem takes many forms; learning vocabulary from text is an especially dramatic and convenient case for research. A new general theory of acquired similarity and knowledge representation, latent semantic analysis (LSA), is presented and used to successfully simulate such learning and several other psycholinguistic phenomena. By inducing global knowledge indirectly from local co-occurrence data in a large body of representative text, LSA acquired knowledge about the full vocabulary of English at a comparable rate to schoolchildren. LSA uses no prior linguistic or perceptual similarity knowledge; it is based solely on a general mathematical learning method that achieves powerful inductive effects by extracting the right number of dimensions (e.g., 300) to represent objects and contexts. Relations to other theories, phenomena, and problems are sketched. Sarcasm understanding may require information beyond the text itself, as in the case of ‘I absolutely love this restaurant!’ which may be sarcastic, depending on the contextual situation. We present the first quantitative evidence to show that historical tweets by an author can provide additional context for sarcasm detection. Our sarcasm detection approach uses two components: a contrast-based predictor (that identifies if there is a sentiment contrast within a target tweet), and a historical tweet-based predictor (that identifies if the sentiment expressed towards an entity in the target tweet agrees with sentiment expressed by the author towards that entity in the past). To avoid a sarcastic message being understood in its unintended literal meaning, in microtexts such as messages on Twitter.com sarcasm is often explicitly marked with the hashtag ‘#sarcasm’. We collected a training corpus of about 78 thousand Dutch tweets with this hashtag. Assuming that the human labeling is correct (annotation of a sample indicates that about 85 of these tweets are indeed sarcastic), we train a machine learning classifier on the harvested examples, and apply it to a test set of a day’s stream of 3.3 million Dutch tweets. Of the 135 explicitly marked tweets on this day, we detect 101 (75 ) when we remove the hashtag. We annotate the top of the ranked list of tweets most likely to be sarcastic that do not have the explicit hashtag. 30 of the top-250 ranked tweets are indeed sarcastic. Analysis shows that sarcasm is often signalled by hyperbole, using intensifiers and exclamations; in contrast, non-hyperbolic sarcastic messages often receive an explicit marker. We hypothesize that explicit markers such as hashtags are the digital extralinguistic equivalent of nonverbal expressions that people employ in live interaction when conveying sarcasm. The robust understanding of sarcasm in a spoken dialogue system requires a reformulation of the dialogue manager’s basic assumptions behind, for example, user behavior and grounding strategies. But automatically detecting a sarcastic tone of voice is not a simple matter. This paper presents some experiments toward sarcasm recognition using prosodic, spectral, and contextual cues. Our results demonstrate that spectral and contextual features can be used to detect sarcasm as well as a human annotator would, and confirm a long-held claim in the field of psychology – that prosody alone is not sufficient to discern whether a speaker is being sarcastic. Index Terms: dialogue, user modeling, sarcasm, speech acts