Silviu Vlad Oprea


2022

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Should a Chatbot be Sarcastic? Understanding User Preferences Towards Sarcasm Generation
Silviu Vlad Oprea | Steven Wilson | Walid Magdy
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Previous sarcasm generation research has focused on how to generate text that people perceive as sarcastic to create more human-like interactions. In this paper, we argue that we should first turn our attention to the question of when sarcasm should be generated, finding that humans consider sarcastic responses inappropriate to many input utterances. Next, we use a theory-driven framework for generating sarcastic responses, which allows us to control the linguistic devices included during generation. For each device, we investigate how much humans associate it with sarcasm, finding that pragmatic insincerity and emotional markers are devices crucial for making sarcasm recognisable.

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SemEval-2022 Task 6: iSarcasmEval, Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic
Ibrahim Abu Farha | Silviu Vlad Oprea | Steven Wilson | Walid Magdy
Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022)

iSarcasmEval is the first shared task to target intended sarcasm detection: the data for this task was provided and labelled by the authors of the texts themselves. Such an approach minimises the downfalls of other methods to collect sarcasm data, which rely on distant supervision or third-party annotations. The shared task contains two languages, English and Arabic, and three subtasks: sarcasm detection, sarcasm category classification, and pairwise sarcasm identification given a sarcastic sentence and its non-sarcastic rephrase. The task received submissions from 60 different teams, with the sarcasm detection task being the most popular. Most of the participating teams utilised pre-trained language models. In this paper, we provide an overview of the task, data, and participating teams.

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Multi-Stage Framework with Refinement Based Point Set Registration for Unsupervised Bi-Lingual Word Alignment
Silviu Vlad Oprea | Sourav Dutta | Haytham Assem
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Cross-lingual alignment of word embeddings are important in knowledge transfer across languages, for improving machine translation and other multi-lingual applications. Current unsupervised approaches relying on learning structure-preserving transformations, using adversarial networks and refinement strategies, suffer from instability and convergence issues. This paper proposes BioSpere, a novel multi-stage framework for unsupervised mapping of bi-lingual word embeddings onto a shared vector space, by combining adversarial initialization, refinement procedure and point set registration. Experiments for parallel dictionary induction and word similarity demonstrate state-of-the-art unsupervised results for BioSpere on diverse languages – showcasing robustness against variable adversarial performance.