Effective models of social dialog must understand a broad range of rhetorical and figurative devices. Rhetorical questions (RQs) are a type of figurative language whose aim is to achieve a pragmatic goal, such as structuring an argument, being persuasive, emphasizing a point, or being ironic. While there are computational models for other forms of figurative language, rhetorical questions have received little attention to date. We expand a small dataset from previous work, presenting a corpus of 10,270 RQs from debate forums and Twitter that represent different discourse functions. We show that we can clearly distinguish between RQs and sincere questions (0.76 F1). We then show that RQs can be used both sarcastically and non-sarcastically, observing that non-sarcastic (other) uses of RQs are frequently argumentative in forums, and persuasive in tweets. We present experiments to distinguish between these uses of RQs using SVM and LSTM models that represent linguistic features and post-level context, achieving results as high as 0.76 F1 for "sarcastic" and 0.77 F1 for "other" in forums, and 0.83 F1 for both "sarcastic" and "other" in tweets. We supplement our quantitative experiments with an in-depth characterization of the linguistic variation in RQs.
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. A common form of sarcasm on Twitter consists of a positive sentiment contrasted with a negative situation. For example, many sarcastic tweets include a positive sentiment, such as “love” or “enjoy”, followed by an expression that describes an undesirable activity or state (e.g., “taking exams” or “being ignored”). We have developed a sarcasm recognizer to identify this type of sarcasm in tweets. We present a novel bootstrapping algorithm that automatically learns lists of positive sentiment phrases and negative situation phrases from sarcastic tweets. We show that identifying contrasting contexts using the phrases learned through bootstrapping yields improved recall for sarcasm recognition. Sarcasm is a sophisticated form of speech act widely used in online communities. Automatic recognition of sarcasm is, however, a novel task. Sarcasm recognition could contribute to the performance of review summarization and ranking systems. This paper presents SASI, a novel Semi-supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification that recognizes sarcastic sentences in product reviews. SASI has two stages: semisupervised pattern acquisition, and sarcasm classification. We experimented on a data set of about 66000 Amazon reviews for various books and products. Using a gold standard in which each sentence was tagged by 3 annotators, we obtained precision of 77 and recall of 83.1 for identifying sarcastic sentences. We found some strong features that characterize sarcastic utterances. However, a combination of more subtle pattern-based features proved more promising in identifying the various facets of sarcasm. We also speculate on the motivation for using sarcasm in online communities and social networks. Sarcasm requires some shared knowledge between speaker and audience; it is a profoundly contextual phenomenon. Most computational approaches to sarcasm detection, however, treat it as a purely linguistic matter, using information such as lexical cues and their corresponding sentiment as predictive features. We show that by including extra-linguistic information from the context of an utterance on Twitter — such as properties of the author, the audience and the immediate communicative environment — we are able to achieve gains in accuracy compared to purely linguistic features in the detection of this complex phenomenon, while also shedding light on features of interpersonal interaction that enable sarcasm in conversation.  Precise semantic representation of a sentence and definitive information extraction are key steps in the accurate processing of sentence meaning, especially for figurative phenomena such as sarcasm, Irony, and metaphor cause literal meanings to be discounted and secondary or extended meanings to be intentionally profiled. Semantic modelling faces a new challenge in social media, because grammatical inaccuracy is commonplace yet many previous state-of-the-art methods exploit grammatical structure. For sarcasm detection over social media content, researchers so far have counted on Bag-of-Words(BOW), N-grams etc. In this paper, we propose a neural network semantic model for the task of sarcasm detection. We also review semantic modelling using Support Vector Machine (SVM) that employs constituency parsetrees fed and labeled with syntactic and semantic information. The proposed neural network model composed of Convolution Neural Network(CNN) and followed by a Long short term memory (LSTM) network and finally a Deep neural network(DNN). The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art textbased methods for sarcasm detection, yielding an F-score of .92.  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 ability to reliably identify sarcasm and irony in text can improve the performance of many Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems including summarization, sentiment analysis, etc. The existing sarcasm detection systems have focused on identifying sarcasm on a sentence level or for a specific phrase. However, often it is impossible to identify a sentence containing sarcasm without knowing the context. In this paper we describe a corpus generation experiment where we collect regular and sarcastic Amazon product reviews. We perform qualitative and quantitative analysis of the corpus. The resulting corpus can be used for identifying sarcasm on two levels: a document and a text utterance (where a text utterance can be as short as a sentence and as long as a whole document). 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. This article reports the findings of a single study examining irony in talk among friends. Sixty-two 10-min conversations between college students and their friends were recorded and analyzed. Five main types of irony were found: jocularity, sarcasm, hyperbole, rhetorical questions, and understatements. These different forms of ironic language were part of 8 of all conversational turns. Analysis of these utterances revealed varying linguistic and social patterns and suggested several constraints on how and why people achieve ironic meaning. The implications of this conclusion for psychological theories of irony are discussed.  