“When Numbers Matter!”: Detecting Sarcasm in Numerical Portions of Text

Abhijeet Dubey, Lakshya Kumar, Arpan Somani, Aditya Joshi, Pushpak Bhattacharyya

Abstract
Research in sarcasm detection spans almost a decade. However a particular form of sarcasm remains unexplored: sarcasm expressed through numbers, which we estimate, forms about 11% of the sarcastic tweets in our dataset. The sentence ‘Love waking up at 3 am’ is sarcastic because of the number. In this paper, we focus on detecting sarcasm in tweets arising out of numbers. Initially, to get an insight into the problem, we implement a rule-based and a statistical machine learning-based (ML) classifier. The rule-based classifier conveys the crux of the numerical sarcasm problem, namely, incongruity arising out of numbers. The statistical ML classifier uncovers the indicators i.e., features of such sarcasm. The actual system in place, however, are two deep learning (DL) models, CNN and attention network that obtains an F-score of 0.93 and 0.91 on our dataset of tweets containing numbers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first line of research investigating the phenomenon of sarcasm arising out of numbers, culminating in a detector thereof.
Anthology ID:
W19-1309
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, USA
Editors:
Alexandra Balahur, Roman Klinger, Veronique Hoste, Carlo Strapparava, Orphee De Clercq
Venue:
WASSA
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
72–80
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-1309
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-1309
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abhijeet Dubey, Lakshya Kumar, Arpan Somani, Aditya Joshi, and Pushpak Bhattacharyya. 2019. “When Numbers Matter!”: Detecting Sarcasm in Numerical Portions of Text. In Proceedings of the Tenth Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment and Social Media Analysis, pages 72–80, Minneapolis, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
“When Numbers Matter!”: Detecting Sarcasm in Numerical Portions of Text (Dubey et al., WASSA 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-5/W19-1309.pdf
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