@inproceedings{naganna-etal-2025-life,
title = "``My life is miserable, have to sign 500 autographs everyday'': Exposing Humblebragging, the Brags in Disguise",
author = "Naganna, Sharath and
Bhattacharjee, Saprativa and
Banerjee, Biplab and
Bhattacharyya, Pushpak",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.198/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.198",
pages = "3838--3858",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5",
abstract = "Humblebragging is a phenomenon in which individuals present self-promotional statements under the guise of modesty or complaints. For example, a statement like, ``Ugh, I can{'}t believe I got promoted to lead the entire team. So stressful!'', subtly highlights an achievement while pretending to be complaining. Detecting humblebragging is important for machines to better understand the nuances of human language, especially in tasks like sentiment analysis and intent recognition. However, this topic has not yet been studied in computational linguistics. For the first time, we introduce the task of automatically detecting humblebragging in text. We formalize the task by proposing a 4-tuple definition of humblebragging and evaluate machine learning, deep learning, and large language models (LLMs) on this task, comparing their performance with humans. We also create and release a dataset called HB-24, containing 3,340 humblebrags generated using GPT-4o. Our experiments show that detecting humblebragging is non-trivial, even for humans. Our best model achieves an F1-score of 0.88. This work lays the foundation for further exploration of this nuanced linguistic phenomenon and its integration into broader natural language understanding systems."
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<abstract>Humblebragging is a phenomenon in which individuals present self-promotional statements under the guise of modesty or complaints. For example, a statement like, “Ugh, I can’t believe I got promoted to lead the entire team. So stressful!”, subtly highlights an achievement while pretending to be complaining. Detecting humblebragging is important for machines to better understand the nuances of human language, especially in tasks like sentiment analysis and intent recognition. However, this topic has not yet been studied in computational linguistics. For the first time, we introduce the task of automatically detecting humblebragging in text. We formalize the task by proposing a 4-tuple definition of humblebragging and evaluate machine learning, deep learning, and large language models (LLMs) on this task, comparing their performance with humans. We also create and release a dataset called HB-24, containing 3,340 humblebrags generated using GPT-4o. Our experiments show that detecting humblebragging is non-trivial, even for humans. Our best model achieves an F1-score of 0.88. This work lays the foundation for further exploration of this nuanced linguistic phenomenon and its integration into broader natural language understanding systems.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T “My life is miserable, have to sign 500 autographs everyday”: Exposing Humblebragging, the Brags in Disguise
%A Naganna, Sharath
%A Bhattacharjee, Saprativa
%A Banerjee, Biplab
%A Bhattacharyya, Pushpak
%Y Che, Wanxiang
%Y Nabende, Joyce
%Y Shutova, Ekaterina
%Y Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
%D 2025
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Vienna, Austria
%@ 979-8-89176-256-5
%F naganna-etal-2025-life
%X Humblebragging is a phenomenon in which individuals present self-promotional statements under the guise of modesty or complaints. For example, a statement like, “Ugh, I can’t believe I got promoted to lead the entire team. So stressful!”, subtly highlights an achievement while pretending to be complaining. Detecting humblebragging is important for machines to better understand the nuances of human language, especially in tasks like sentiment analysis and intent recognition. However, this topic has not yet been studied in computational linguistics. For the first time, we introduce the task of automatically detecting humblebragging in text. We formalize the task by proposing a 4-tuple definition of humblebragging and evaluate machine learning, deep learning, and large language models (LLMs) on this task, comparing their performance with humans. We also create and release a dataset called HB-24, containing 3,340 humblebrags generated using GPT-4o. Our experiments show that detecting humblebragging is non-trivial, even for humans. Our best model achieves an F1-score of 0.88. This work lays the foundation for further exploration of this nuanced linguistic phenomenon and its integration into broader natural language understanding systems.
%R 10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.198
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.198/
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.198
%P 3838-3858
Markdown (Informal)
[“My life is miserable, have to sign 500 autographs everyday”: Exposing Humblebragging, the Brags in Disguise](https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.198/) (Naganna et al., Findings 2025)
ACL