Automatic Irony Detection using Feature Fusion and Ensemble Classifier

With the advent of micro-blogging sites, users are pioneer in expressing their sentiments and emotions on global issues through text. Automatic detection and classification of sentiments like sarcastic or ironic content in microblogging reviews is a challenging task. It requires a system that manages some kind of knowledge to interpret the sentiment expressed in text. The available approaches are quite limited in their capabilities and scope to detect ironic utterances present in the text. In this regards, the paper propose feature fusion to provide knowledge to the system by alternative sets of features obtained using linguistic and content based text features. The proposed work extracts five sets of linguistic features and fuses with features selected using two stages of a feature selection method. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct extensive experimentation by selecting different feature subsets. The performances of the proposed method are evaluated using Support Vector Machine (SVM), Logistic Regression (LR), Random Forest (RF), Decision Tree (DT) and ensemble classifiers. The experimental result shows the proposed approach significantly out-performs the conventional methods

Applying basic features from sentiment analysis on automatic irony detection

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19390-8_38People use social media to express their opinions. Often linguistic devices such as irony are used. From the sentiment analysis perspective such utterances represent a challenge being a polarity reversor (usually from positive to negative). This paper presents an approach to address irony detection from a machine learning perspective. Our model considers structural features as well as, for the first time, sentiment analysis features such as the overall sentiment of a tweet and a score of its polarity. The approach has been evaluated over a set classifiers such as: Naïve Bayes, Decision Tree, Maximum Entropy, Support Vector Machine, and for the first time in irony detection task: Multilayer Perceptron. The results obtained showed the ability of our model to distinguish between potentially ironic and non-ironic sentences.The National Council for Science and Technology (CONACyT Mexico) has funded the research work of the first author (Grant No.218109/313683, CVU-369616). The research work of third author was carried out inthe framework of WIQ-EI IRSES (Grant No. 269180) within the FP 7 Marie Curie, DIANA-APPLICATIONS (TIN2012-38603-C02-01) projects and the VLC/CAMPUS Microcluster on Multimodal Interaction in Intelligent Systems.Hernández Farías, I.; Benedí Ruiz, JM.; Rosso, P. (2015). Applying basic features from sentiment analysis on automatic irony detection. En Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis: 7th Iberian Conference, IbPRIA 2015, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, June 17-19, 2015, Proceedings. Springer International Publishing. 337-344. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19390-8_38S337344Alba-Juez, L.: Irony and the other off record strategies within politeness theory. J. Engl. Am. Stud. 16, 13–24 (1995)Attardo, S.: Irony markers and functions: towards a goal-oriented theory of irony and its processing. Rask 12, 3–20 (2000)Barbieri, F., Saggion, H.: Modelling Irony in Twitter, pp. 56–64. Association for Computational Linguistics (2014)Bosco, C., Patti, V., Bolioli, A.: Developing corpora for sentiment analysis: the case of irony and senti-tut. IEEE Intell. Syst. 28(2), 55–63 (2013)Buschmeier, K., Cimiano, P., Klinger, R.: An impact analysis of features in a classification approach to irony detection in product reviews. In: Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, pp. 42–49. Association for Computational Linguistics (2014)Ghosh, A., Li, G., Veale, T., Rosso, P., Shutova, E., Reyes, A., Barnden, J.: Sentiment analysis of figurative language in twitter. In: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2015), Co-located with NAACL and *SEM (2015)Hu, M., Liu, B.: Mining and summarizing customer reviews. In: Proceedings of the Tenth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2004, pp. 168–177(2004)Maynard, D., Greenwood, M.: Who cares about sarcastic tweets? investigating the impact of sarcasm on sentiment analysis. In: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2014), European Language Resources Association (ELRA) (2014)Pedersen, T., Patwardhan, S., Michelizzi, J.: Wordnet::similarity: measuring the relatedness of concepts. In: Proceedings of the 9th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 1024–1025. Association for Computational LinguisticsReyes, A., Rosso, P., Veale, T.: A multidimensional approach for detecting irony in twitter. Lang. Resour. Eval. 47(1), 239–268 (2013)Wallace, B.C.: Computational irony: a survey and new perspectives. Artif. Intell. Rev. 43, 467–483 (2013)Wang, A.P.: #irony or #sarcasm – a quantitative and qualitative study based on twitter. In: Proceedings of the PACLIC: the 27th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation, pp. 349–356. Department of English, National Chengchi University (2013)Whissell, C.: Using the revised dictionary of affect in language to quantify the emotional undertones of samples of natural languages. Psychol. Rep. 2, 509–521 (2009)Wolf, A.: Emotional expression online: gender differences in emoticon use. CyberPsychology Behavior 3, 827–833 (2000

Genial...: Automatic Irony Detection in Spanish Tweets

Irony is a form of non-literal speech that can alter the meaning of an utterance. Understanding irony may greatly impact Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as sentiment analysis or stance detection. While a growing body of NLP research has started to focus on irony detection, little work has been conducted for other languages such as Spanish. This thesis aims to contribute to research in Spanish irony detection by, taking as a basis an existing dataset (IroSvA) for irony detection in Spanish, revising it and enriching it with annotations for irony types. The improved dataset constitutes the first corpus including labels for types of irony in Spanish. Furthermore, we undertake crosslingual experimentation on irony detection in three different evaluation settings: monolingual, multilingual, and crosslingual. For these experiments, Italian and English datasets were employed in addition to the Spanish ones. Results show that irony does not transfer easily across languages except in the case of Italian to Spanish, for which the results are surprisingly good. Furthermore, training on multiple languages does not help to improve results for irony detection. Results also demonstrate that monolingual language models perform better than multilingual ones. Finally, the thesis offers a detailed and comprehensive analysis and discussion on the difficulties in annotating and learning to detect irony

We usually don't like going to the dentist : using common sense to detect irony on Twitter

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SemEval-2018 task 3 : irony detection in English tweets

This paper presents the first shared task on irony detection: given a tweet, automatic natural language processing systems should determine whether the tweet is ironic (Task A) and which type of irony (if any) is expressed (Task B). The ironic tweets were collected using irony-related hashtags (i.e. #irony, #sarcasm, #not) and were subsequently manually annotated to minimise the amount of noise in the corpus. Prior to distributing the data, hashtags that were used to collect the tweets were removed from the corpus. For both tasks, a training corpus of 3,834 tweets was provided, as well as a test set containing 784 tweets. Our shared tasks received submissions from 43 teams for the binary classification Task A and from 31 teams for the multiclass Task B. The highest classification scores obtained for both subtasks are respectively F1= 0.71 and F1= 0.51 and demonstrate that fine-grained irony classification is much more challenging than binary irony detection