Sarcasm is often expressed through several verbal and non-verbal cues, e.g., a change of tone, overemphasis in a word, a drawn-out syllable, or a straight looking face. Most of the recent work in sarcasm detection has been carried out on textual data. In this paper, we argue that incorporating multimodal cues can improve the automatic classification of sarcasm. As a first step towards enabling the development of multimodal approaches for sarcasm detection, we propose a new sarcasm dataset, Multimodal Sarcasm Detection Dataset (MUStARD), compiled from popular TV shows. MUStARD consists of audiovisual utterances annotated with sarcasm labels. Each utterance is accompanied by its context of historical utterances in the dialogue, which provides additional information on the scenario where the utterance occurs. Our initial results show that the use of multimodal information can reduce the relative error rate of sarcasm detection by up to 12.9 in F-score when compared to the use of individual modalities. The full dataset is publicly available for use at this https URL
@cite_30: 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.
@cite_4: 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.
@cite_33: We investigate the accuracy of a set of surface patterns in identifying ironic sentences in comments submitted by users to an on-line newspaper. The initial focus is on identifying irony in sentences containing positive predicates since these sentences are more exposed to irony, making their true polarity harder to recognize. We show that it is possible to find ironic sentences with relatively high precision (from 45 to 85 ) by exploring certain oral or gestural clues in user comments, such as emoticons, onomatopoeic expressions for laughter, heavy punctuation marks, quotation marks and positive interjections. We also demonstrate that clues based on deeper linguistic information are relatively inefficient in capturing irony in user-generated content, which points to the need for exploring additional types of oral clues.
@cite_8: 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.
@cite_1: 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.
@cite_15: Sarcasm is a form of speech act in which the speakers convey their message in an implicit way. The inherently ambiguous nature of sarcasm sometimes makes it hard even for humans to decide whether an utterance is sarcastic or not. Recognition of sarcasm can benefit many sentiment analysis NLP applications, such as review summarization, dialogue systems and review ranking systems. In this paper we experiment with semi-supervised sarcasm identification on two very different data sets: a collection of 5.9 million tweets collected from Twitter, and a collection of 66000 product reviews from Amazon. Using the Mechanical Turk we created a gold standard sample in which each sentence was tagged by 3 annotators, obtaining F-scores of 0.78 on the product reviews dataset and 0.83 on the Twitter dataset. We discuss the differences between the datasets and how the algorithm uses them (e.g., for the Amazon dataset the algorithm makes use of structured information). We also discuss the utility of Twitter #sarcasm hashtags for the task.
Traditional approaches for detecting sarcasm in text have considered rule-based techniques @cite_30 , lexical and pragmatic features @cite_33 , stylistic features @cite_15 , situational disparity @cite_8 , incongruity @cite_1 , or user-provided annotations such as hashtags @cite_4 .