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Identifying sarcasm in Twitter: a closer look

Published:19 June 2011Publication History

ABSTRACT

Sarcasm transforms the polarity of an apparently positive or negative utterance into its opposite. We report on a method for constructing a corpus of sarcastic Twitter messages in which determination of the sarcasm of each message has been made by its author. We use this reliable corpus to compare sarcastic utterances in Twitter to utterances that express positive or negative attitudes without sarcasm. We investigate the impact of lexical and pragmatic factors on machine learning effectiveness for identifying sarcastic utterances and we compare the performance of machine learning techniques and human judges on this task. Perhaps unsurprisingly, neither the human judges nor the machine learning techniques perform very well.

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        • Published in

          cover image DL Hosted proceedings
          HLT '11: Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: short papers - Volume 2
          June 2011
          765 pages
          ISBN:9781932432886

          Publisher

          Association for Computational Linguistics

          United States

          Publication History

          • Published: 19 June 2011

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          • research-article

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          Overall Acceptance Rate240of768submissions,31%

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