Automatic Sarcasm Detection: A Survey <s> SARCASM STUDIES IN LINGUISTICS <s> In this research we investigated the role of context in interpretation (Experiments 1 and 2) and relative processing (Experiment 3) of literal and ironic statements. As such, we manipulated degree of situational negativity (using strongly negative, weakly negative, and neutral contexts) and found that, in strongly negative situations, reading times for ironic statements were slower than for literal statements, whereas in weakly negative situations reading times for ironic statements were faster than or equivalent to reading times for literal statements. When these reading time data were related to interpretation data, we found that differences in processing time could be predicted by certain aspects of interpretation. We argue that these results support a direct access model of figurative language processing (e.g., Gibbs, 1994), and also support Colston's (2002) theory of contrast and assimilation in verbal irony. <s> BIB001 </s> Automatic Sarcasm Detection: A Survey <s> SARCASM STUDIES IN LINGUISTICS <s> This article examines the use of irony/sarcasm against a corpus of spontaneous spoken data. Unlike previous studies on the subject, our analysis takes into account the entire ironical exchange. We focus particularly on responses to an initial ironical turn, taking into consideration the issue of multi-turn ironical exchanges and unacknowledged ironical utterances. We also consider the effect of sociolinguistic variables. The naturally occurring data of our corpus broadly support the view that speakers tend to limit the extent of the violations of the cooperative principle, thus producing relatively few multi-turn ironical/sarcastic utterances. # 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. <s> BIB002 </s> Automatic Sarcasm Detection: A Survey <s> SARCASM STUDIES IN LINGUISTICS <s> This article investigates the contextual components utilized to convey sarcastic verbal irony, testing whether theoretical components deemed as necessary for creating a sense of irony are, in fact, necessary. A novel task was employed: Given a set of statements that out of context were not rated as sarcastic, participants were instructed to either generate discourse context that would make the statements sarcastic or meaningful (without further specification). In a series of studies, these generated contexts were shown to differ from one another along the dimensions presumed as necessary (failed expectation, pragmatic insincerity, negative tension, and presence of a victim) and along stylistic components (as indexed by the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program). However, none of these components were found to be necessary. Indeed, in each case, the items rated as highest in sarcasm were often at the lowest levels on the putative “necessary” characteristic. These data are taken as consistent with const... <s> BIB003 </s> Automatic Sarcasm Detection: A Survey <s> SARCASM STUDIES IN LINGUISTICS <s> Traditional theories of sarcasm treat it as a case of a speaker’s meaning the opposite of what she says. Recently, ‘expressivists’ have argued that sarcasm is not a type of speaker meaning at all, but merely the expression of a dissociative attitude toward an evoked thought or perspective. I argue that we should analyze sarcasm in terms of meaning inversion, as the traditional theory does; but that we need to construe ‘meaning’ more broadly, to include illocutionary force and evaluative attitudes as well as propositional content. I distinguish four subclasses of sarcasm, individuated in terms of the target of inversion. Three of these classes raise serious challenges for a standard implicature analysis. The standard view of sarcasm or verbal irony 1 was articulated by Quintilian roughly two millennia ago, as speech in which “we understand something which is the opposite of what is actually said” (95/1920, 401). Indeed, sarcasm is often presented as “the textbook case,” as Robyn Carston (2002, 15) says, of the fact that speaker’s meaning can come apart from sentence meaning. We also have a widely accepted pragmatic explanation of how sarcasm works. According to the standard Gricean reconstruction, in speaking ∗ Thanks for fertile discussion to audiences at the Conference on Meaning and Commu <s> BIB004 </s> Automatic Sarcasm Detection: A Survey <s> SARCASM STUDIES IN LINGUISTICS <s> Grice’s Studies in the Way of Words (1989) — which turned twenty years old around the same time as the Theoretical Linguistics Program in Budapest did — included Grice’s seminal 1967 William James lectures entitled “Logic and Conversation”, thus bringing together Grice’s theory of communication — about conversational implicatures — and his theory of meaning side by side for the first time, as parts of a unified picture. The connections between the two proposals have, since then, been extensively discussed and diagramed (“arranged”) — we’ve seen the binary tree: the label (“epithet”) ‘implicature’ branching into ‘conventional’ and ‘conversational’, the latter branching into ‘particularized’ and ‘generalized’. Meanwhile, curiously, very little attention has been devoted to the issue of making room for the full range of commitments that a speaker undertakes in making an utterance. These commitments include unusual instances like slips of the tongue, to which Davidson called attention in his 1985 paper “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs”. When Mrs. Malaprop exclaimed: “Sure, if I reprehend any thing in this world it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs!”1, by reprehend/oracular/derangement/epitaphs, she meant what speakers of English commonly mean by comprehend/vernacular/arrangement/epithets. We might doubt whether Mrs. Malaprop does in fact fully comprehend her vernacular tongue, but regardless, as her audience, we can comprehend her utterance. And what’s more pertinent for our purposes and is an issue Davidson does not discuss, is that Mrs. Malaprop unwittingly commits herself to something quite bizarre about tombstone inscriptions — epitaphs. Likewise, when Mrs. Malaprop calls someone “the very pineapple of politeness”2 (intending to say ‘pinnacle of politeness’), she commits herself to a claim relating to an extraordinarily exotic kind of fruit even though she <s> BIB005 </s> Automatic Sarcasm Detection: A Survey <s> SARCASM STUDIES IN LINGUISTICS <s> Irony, a creative use of language, has received scarce attention from the computational linguistics research point of view. We propose an automatic system capable of detecting irony with good accuracy in the social network Twitter. Twitter allows users to post short messages (140 characters) which usually do not follow the expected rules of the grammar, users tend to truncate words and use particular punctuation. For these reason automatic detection of Irony in Twitter is not trivial and requires specific linguistic tools. We propose in this paper a new set of experiments to assess the relevance of the features included in our model. Our model does not include words or sequences of words as features, aiming to detect inner characteristic of Irony. <s> BIB006
Before we begin with approaches to automatic sarcasm detection, we discuss linguistic studies pertaining to sarcasm. Sarcasm is a form of figurative language where the literal meaning of words does not hold, and instead the opposite interpretation is intended [27] . Sarcasm is closely related to irony-in fact, it is a form of irony. Reference  states that "verbal irony is recognized by literary scholars as a technique of using incongruity to suggest a distinction between reality and expectation." They define two types of irony: verbal and situational. Verbal irony is irony that is expressed in words. For example, the sentence "Your paper on grammar correction contains several grammatical errors" is ironic. On the other hand, situational irony is irony that arises out of a situation. For example, a situation where a scientist discovers the cure for a disease but herself succumbs to the disease before being able to apply the cure is a situational irony. Reference  refers to sarcastic language as "irony that is especially bitter and caustic." There are two components of this definition: (a) presence of irony, (b) being bitter. Both together are identifying features of sarcasm. For example, "I could not make it big in Hollywood, because my writing was not bad enough." This example from Reference  is sarcastic, because: (a) it contains an ironic statement that implies a writer in Hollywood would need to be bad at writing, (b) the appraisal in the statement is in fact bitter/contemptuous towards the entity "Hollywood." Several linguistic studies describe different aspects of sarcasm: (1) Characteristics of sarcasm: Reference BIB003 states that sarcasm occurs along several dimensions, namely, failed expectation, pragmatic insincerity, negative tension, and the presence of a victim. Reference BIB002 states that sarcasm can be understood in terms of the response it elicits. The authors observe that the responses to sarcasm may be laughter, no response, BIB006 smile, sarcasm (in retort), a change of topic, 5 literal reply, and non-verbal reactions (a popular non-verbal reaction would be rolling one's eyes). According to Reference  , sarcasm arises when there is situational disparity between text and contextual information. For example, the sentence "I love being ignored" is understood as sarcastic due to the disparity between the contextual information that being ignored is an undesirable situation and that the speaker claims to love it in the given sentence. (2) Types of sarcasm: Reference BIB004 shows that there are four types of sarcasm: (i) Propositional: In such situations, the statement appears to be a proposition but has an implicit sentiment involved. For example, "Your plan sounds fantastic! " This sentence may be interpreted as non-sarcastic, if the context is not understood. (ii) Embedded: This type of sarcasm has an embedded incongruity in the form of words and phrases themselves. For example, "John has turned out to be such a diplomat that no one takes him seriously." The incongruity is embedded in the meaning of the word "" and rest of the sentence. (iii) Likeprefixed: A like-phrase provides an implied denial of the argument being made. For example, "Like you care! " is a common sarcastic retort. (iv) Illocutionary: This kind of sarcasm involves non-textual clues that indicate an attitude opposite to a sincere utterance. For example, rolling one's eyes when saying "Yeah right." In such cases, prosodic variations play a role. The examples above are from Reference BIB005 . (3) Tuple-representation of sarcasm: Reference BIB001 represents sarcasm as a 6-tuple consisting of <S, H, C, u, p, p >, where S = Speaker, H = Hearer/Listener, C = Context, u = Utterance, p = Literal Proposition, and p = Intended Proposition. The tuple can be read as "Speaker S generates an utterance u in Context C meaning proposition p but intending that hearer H understands p." For example, if a teacher says to a student, "That's how assignments should be done!" and if the student knows that they have barely completed the assignment, they would understand the sarcasm. In context of the 6-tuple above, the properties of this sarcasm would be: S: Teacher H: Student C: The student has not completed his/her assignment. u: "That's how assignments should be done!" p: The student has done a good job at the assignment. p': The student has done a bad job at the assignment.