Sarcasm-R1: Enhancing Sarcasm Detection through Focused Reasoning

Qi Yang, Jingjie Zeng, Liang Yang, Kai Ma, Hongfei Lin


Abstract
Sarcasm detection is a crucial yet challenging task in natural language processing. Existing methods primarily rely on supervised learning or prompt engineering, which often struggle to capture the complex reasoning process required for effective sarcasm detection. This paper proposes a novel approach that decomposes sarcasm detection into three fundamental dimensions: language, context, and emotion, meticulously modeling the sarcasm reasoning process. To enhance the quality of reasoning, we employ reinforcement learning algorithms and design customized reward models for each dimension. We utilize five widely used sarcasm detection datasets and annotate the sarcasm reasoning process from these three dimensions to improve the performance of the reward models. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods in most cases. Additionally, we observe the central role of emotional contrast in sarcasm detection. Our research provides empirical insights into the mechanism of sarcasm, emphasizing that emotional contrast is at its core, supported by linguistic and contextual cues.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.570
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10773–10785
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/name-variant-enfa-fane/2025.findings-emnlp.570/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.570
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Qi Yang, Jingjie Zeng, Liang Yang, Kai Ma, and Hongfei Lin. 2025. Sarcasm-R1: Enhancing Sarcasm Detection through Focused Reasoning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 10773–10785, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Sarcasm-R1: Enhancing Sarcasm Detection through Focused Reasoning (Yang et al., Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/name-variant-enfa-fane/2025.findings-emnlp.570.pdf
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