Perceived and Intended Sarcasm Detection with Graph Attention Networks

Joan Plepi, Lucie Flek


Abstract
Existing sarcasm detection systems focus on exploiting linguistic markers, context, or user-level priors. However, social studies suggest that the relationship between the author and the audience can be equally relevant for the sarcasm usage and interpretation. In this work, we propose a framework jointly leveraging (1) a user context from their historical tweets together with (2) the social information from a user’s neighborhood in an interaction graph, to contextualize the interpretation of the post. We distinguish between perceived and self-reported sarcasm identification. We use graph attention networks (GAT) over users and tweets in a conversation thread, combined with various dense user history representations. Apart from achieving state-of-the-art results on the recently published dataset of 19k Twitter users with 30K labeled tweets, adding 10M unlabeled tweets as context, our experiments indicate that the graph network contributes to interpreting the sarcastic intentions of the author more than to predicting the sarcasm perception by others.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.408
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4746–4753
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.408
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.408
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Joan Plepi and Lucie Flek. 2021. Perceived and Intended Sarcasm Detection with Graph Attention Networks. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 4746–4753, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Perceived and Intended Sarcasm Detection with Graph Attention Networks (Plepi & Flek, Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.408.pdf