Chandler: An Explainable Sarcastic Response Generator

Silviu Oprea, Steven Wilson, Walid Magdy


Abstract
We introduce Chandler, a system that generates sarcastic responses to a given utterance. Previous sarcasm generators assume the intended meaning that sarcasm conceals is the opposite of the literal meaning. We argue that this traditional theory of sarcasm provides a grounding that is neither necessary, nor sufficient, for sarcasm to occur. Instead, we ground our generation process on a formal theory that specifies conditions that unambiguously differentiate sarcasm from non-sarcasm. Furthermore, Chandler not only generates sarcastic responses, but also explanations for why each response is sarcastic. This provides accountability, crucial for avoiding miscommunication between humans and conversational agents, particularly considering that sarcastic communication can be offensive. In human evaluation, Chandler achieves comparable or higher sarcasm scores, compared to state-of-the-art generators, while generating more diverse responses, that are more specific and more coherent to the input.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-demo.38
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Heike Adel, Shuming Shi
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
339–349
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo.38
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-demo.38
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Silviu Oprea, Steven Wilson, and Walid Magdy. 2021. Chandler: An Explainable Sarcastic Response Generator. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 339–349, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Chandler: An Explainable Sarcastic Response Generator (Oprea et al., EMNLP 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo.38.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo.38.mp4