Experimenting with a dataset of approximately 1.6M user comments from a Greek news sports portal, we explore how a state of the art RNN-based moderation method can be improved by adding user embeddings, user type embeddings, user biases, or user type biases. We observe improvements in all cases, with user embeddings leading to the biggest performance gains.
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.