Exploring the fine-grained analysis and automatic detection of irony on Twitter

Abstract

To push the state of the art in text mining applications, research in natural language processing has increasingly been investigating automatic irony detection, but manually annotated irony corpora are scarce. We present the construction of a manually annotated irony corpus based on a fine-grained annotation scheme that allows for identification of different types of irony. We conduct a series of binary classification experiments for automatic irony recognition using a support vector machine (SVM) that exploits a varied feature set and compare this method to a deep learning approach that is based on an LSTM network and (pre-trained) word embeddings. Evaluation on a held-out corpus shows that the SVM model outperforms the neural network approach and benefits from combining lexical, semantic and syntactic information sources. A qualitative analysis of the classification output reveals that the classifier performance may be further enhanced by integrating implicit sentiment information and context- and user-based features.