Clues for Detecting Irony in User-Generated Contents: Oh...!! It’s “so easy" ;-)

Paula Cristina Carvalho (1) , Luís Sarmento (2, 3) , Mário J. Silva (1) , Eugénio de Oliveira (2, 3)

1 LaSIGE [Lisboa]
2 Universidade do Porto = University of Porto
3 LIACC - Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science Laboratory

We investigate the accuracy of a set of surface patterns in identifying ironic sentences in comments submitted by users to an on-line newspaper. The initial focus is on identifying irony in sentences containing positive predicates since these sentences are more exposed to irony, making their true po-larity harder to recognize. We show that it is possible to find ironic sentences with relatively high precision (from 45% to 85%) by exploring certain oral or gestural clues in user comments, such as emoticons, onomatopoeic expressions for laughter, heavy punctuation marks, quotation marks and positive interjections. We also demonstrate that clues based on deeper linguistic information are relatively inefficient in capturing irony in user-generated content, which points to the need for exploring additional types of oral clues.

Mots clés: user-generated content; irony detection; opinion mining

Domaines: Traitement du texte et du document; Linguistique

Paula Cristina Carvalho, Luís Sarmento, Mário J. Silva, Eugénio de Oliveira. Clues for Detecting Irony in User-Generated Contents: Oh...!! It’s “so easy" ;-). Text Sentiment Analysis (TSA'09), 2009, Hong Kong, China. ⟨10.1145/1651461.1651471⟩. ⟨hal-01107892⟩