social digital media channels such as e-mail, blogs,
tweets etc.
A sarcastic statement is a witty or bitter remark
that seems to admire someone or something but ac-
tually is actually used to insult or taunt. (e.g., “I
am trying to imagine you with a personality”). A
statement which contains sarcasm will generally de-
pend upon some context. Hence it is very difficult to
detect sarcasm in single sentence. In language and
literary works, different kinds of sarcasm are used:
self-deprecating, brooding, deadpan, polite, obnox-
ious, manic and raging. Humans can generally distin-
guish such subtle varieties of sarcasm. However, it is
a challenge (Gonz´alez-Ib´anez et al., 2011) to develop
a computational scheme to even distinguish between
literal and sarcastic statements.
Processing well-formed natural language sen-
tences at lexical, syntactic and, to some extend se-
mantic levels is an established science. However,han-
dling figures-of-speech that have different properties
has lagged behind because of the lack of remarkable
computational theories and models.
People often use sarcasm and irony to express
their opinions. There are many opinion mining tools.
These fail to identify the sarcastic or ironic utter-
ances. Usage of sarcasm is very common in web
content like tweets, blogs and product reviews. Users
express their feelings or reactions by using sarcasm,
irony and other linguistic devices. To understand
these opinions we have to go deep into the theory of
sarcasm. When a writer wishes to say some negative
remark about someone, he does not convey it directly,
he uses sarcasm to say “a negative thing in positive
words.” (e.g., “awww i love to get cute goodnight
texts from no one”). This example shows how peo-
ple use sarcasm for conveying negative views. Words
which exhibit politeness commonly used in sarcastic
utterances. One of our aims is to capture the usage of
positive words to convey negative things.
It is a challenge to automatically interpret and
identify figurative usage of words. Our work is con-
centrates towards sarcasm. Sometimes it is difficult
for humans to identify sarcasm using human intelli-
gence, because it not so obvious. So semanticanalysis
may not be very useful. We model this by statistical
models to predict the sarcastic utterances. Some of
the sarcastic remarks came into picture because of us-
age. So we concentrate on statistical models and try
to to develop a supervised learning model which can
identify the sarcastic utterances.
2 RELATED WORK
Some major works in automatic processing of natural
language texts for detection of sarcastic utterances are
(Lakoff and Johnson, 2008; Utsumi, 2004; Tsur et al.,
2010; Reyes et al., 2012; Riloff et al., ; Gonz´alez-
Ib´anez et al., 2011).
According to (Lakoff and Johnson, 2008) people
often use sarcasm for insulting others. In sarcastic
sentences, the speaker does not explicitly mention the
negative interpretation of the sentence, so it is the re-
sponsibility of the listener to recognize speaker’s in-
tention.
(Utsumi, 2004) shows how linguistic style and
contextual features plays a vital role in processing
irony. He identifies irony on the basis of 3 types
of patterns like: “Opposition”, “Rhetorical question”,
and “Circumlocution.”
Opposition is a statement in which the mean-
ing is positive but is related to a negative situation,
like:“This restaurant serves the dishes quickly.”
Rhetorical questions are statements which contain
a question as an obvious fact like: “Do you know the
recipe for the dishes?”
Circumlocutions are statements weakly related to
an expectation : “I think you are just going to buy the
ingredients for the recipe.” According to the author
the degree of irony and sarcasm increases when the
sentence is of type opposition, rhetorical question or
circumlocution.
(Tsur et al., 2010) approached this problem by a
semi supervised algorithm which has two stages: a
pattern collection followed by a classification of sar-
castic utterances. They conduct experiments on re-
views of Amazon.com
1
. They use pattern matching
and features based on punctuation to detect sarcasm.
Each pattern is replaced by its general pattern like
[product], [company]. Classification of a new review
is based on the exact or partial match with stored pat-
terns.
(Gonz´alez-Ib´anez et al., 2011) have done a 3-
way comparison of sarcasm with positive and nega-
tive sentiment carrying tweets. They use lexical and
pragmatic features for the identification of sarcasm
in Twitter data. Lexical feature is a combination of
unigrams and dictionary based features. Pragmatic
feature contains positive emoticons(smilies) and neg-
ative emoticons(frowning faces). According to them
the auxiliary verb and the punctuation are also impor-
tant features for identifying sarcasm. They conducted
human evaluation for checking their algorithm and in
1
www.amazon.in
SarcasmDetectionusingSentimentandSemanticFeatures
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