Impact of oxymoron features and deep learning techniques in the detection of sarcastic contents

Abstract

Even though various features have been investigated in the detection of figurative language, oxymoron features have not been considered in the classification of sarcastic content. The main objective of this work is to present a system that can automatically classify sarcastic phrases in multi-domain data. This multi-domain dataset consisting of 67850 sarcastic and non-sarcastic data is collected from various websites to identify sarcastic or non-sarcastic utterances. Multiple approaches are examined in this work to improve sarcasm identification: 1. A Combination of fasttext embedding, syntactic, semantic, lexical n-gram, and oxymoron features 2. TF-IDF feature weighting scheme 3. Three machine learning algorithms (SVM, Multinomial Naïve Bayes, and Random Forest), three deep learning algorithms (CNN, LSTM, MLP), and one ensemble model (CNN + LSTM) The CNN + LSTM model achieves a Precision of 91.32%, Recall of 92.85%, F-Score of 92.08%, accuracy of 92.01%, and Kappa of 0.84 by combining the fasttext embedding, bigram, syntactic, semantic, and oxymoron features with TF-IDF method. These experimental results show CNN + LSTM with a combination of all features outperforms the other algorithms in classifying the sarcasm in both datasets. The sarcasm classification performance of our dataset and another sarcasm news dataset was compared while applying the above model.