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Sarcasm Analysis Using Conversation Context (arxiv.org)
78 points by rbanffy on Aug 25, 2018 | hide | past | pdf | 19 comments on HN

In plain words: The system reads a social media post together with the replies around it, using a pointer that highlights the words that matter most. That beat reading each post alone, and the highlighted parts often matched what people picked as the trigger and sarcastic sentence.

Abstract · Sarcasm Analysis using Conversation Context

Computational models for sarcasm detection have often relied on the content of utterances in isolation. However, the speaker's sarcastic intent is not always apparent without additional context. Focusing on social media discussions, we investigate three issues: (1) does modeling conversation context help in sarcasm detection; (2) can we identify what part of conversation context triggered the sarcastic reply; and (3) given a sarcastic post that contains multiple sentences, can we identify the specific sentence that is sarcastic. To address the first issue, we investigate several types of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks that can model both the conversation context and the current turn. We show that LSTM networks with sentence-level attention on context and current turn, as well as the conditional LSTM network (Rocktaschel et al. 2016), outperform the LSTM model that reads only the current turn. As conversation context, we consider the prior turn, the succeeding turn or both. Our computational models are tested on two types of social media platforms: Twitter and discussion forums. We discuss several differences between these datasets ranging from their size to the nature of the gold-label annotations. To address the last two issues, we present a qualitative analysis of attention weights produced by the LSTM models (with attention) and discuss the results compared with human performance on the two tasks.

Debanjan Ghosh, Alexander R. Fabbri, Smaranda Muresan
arXiv:1808.07531 · cs.CL · submitted Aug 22, 2018 · updated Aug 28, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · Computational Linguistics (journal)

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"Internet Argument Corpus (IAC) is a publicly available corpus of online forum conversations on a range of social and political topics, from gun control debates, marijuana legalization, climate change, evolution, to name a few (Walker et al. 2012). The corpus comes with annotations of different types of social language categories such as agreement/disagreement (between a pair of online posts), nastiness, and sarcasm. There are different version of IAC and we use a specific subset of IAC in this research. Oraby et al. (2016) have introduced Sarcasm Corpus V2, a subset of the Internet Argument Corpus V2, which contain 9,400 posts labeled as sarcastic or non-sarcastic (balanced dataset)."
I wonder if there's a corpus labelling comments and posts based on the context of, "/s". Because labelling a comment as sarcastic is a great indicator the poster understands how sarcasm works.
A sarcasm detector. That's a real useful invention.
Sadly there is not enough “conversation context” in your comment to use as a test in this analyzer.
Joking aside, TTS engines could benefit from that.

Even though I can see how a false positive would make a great joke out of a serious text.

This is the perfect response. I assume you're being sarcastic, but I can't tell for certain. Even most humans have trouble detecting sarcasm in print - would a sarcasm detector?

Since sarcasm is the biggest weakness of sentiment analysis, I don't have much faith that sentiment analysis tools will produce truthful results when aimed at social media.

"I assume you're being sarcastic, but I can't tell for certain"

What if the person you're responding to (for the sake of argument) really doesn't know?

I mean, it can take some time to find out if an invention is truly useful.

So if we point it at that statement and demand a verdict, it's sort of an undecidable problem.

This is the perfect response. I assume you're being sarcastic, but I can't tell for certain.

No, it is simply a good response. I'm British (and have special skills) and can inform you that satherx is either rather obviously sarcastic or a lemon.

Yes, if we ever want our digital assistants to understand language.
Who is going to write the app? It is sorely needed.
The computers can save us from Poe's Law. ;)
"Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is utterly impossible to parody a Creationist in such a way that someone won't mistake for the genuine article." - Nathan Poe
If this becomes an app, I'll buy it
Finally, visitors from Betelgeuse no longer have to rely on a human interpreter.
Please use it to analyze this thread :)
Lets aim it at the LKML. ;)
sucking all the fun out of comment sections.