Sarcastic or Not: Word Embeddings to Predict the Literal or Sarcastic Meaning of Words
Debanjan Ghosh, Weiwei Guo, Smaranda Muresan · 2015
Sarcasm is generally characterized as a figure of speech that involves the substitution of a literal by a figurative meaning, which is usually the opposite of the original literal meaning.We re-frame the sarcasm detection task as a type of word sense disambiguation problem, where the sense of a word is either literal or sarcastic.We call this the Literal/Sarcastic Sense Disambiguation (LSSD) task.We address two issues: 1) how to collect a set of target words that can have either literal or sarcastic meanings depending on context; and 2) given an utterance and a target word, how to automatically detect whether the target word is used in the literal or the sarcastic sense.For the latter, we investigate several distributional semantics methods and show that a Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifier with a modified kernel using word embeddings achieves a 7-10% F1 improvement over a strong lexical baseline.