Text-based Sarcasm Detection on Social Networks: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Sarcasm is a sophisticated phenomenon used for conveying a meaning that differs from what is being said, and it is usually used to express displeasure or ridicule others. Sentiment analysis is a process of uncovering the subjective information from a text. Detecting figurative language such as irony or sarcasm, is a focused challenging research field of sentiment analysis. Detecting and understanding the use of sarcasm in social networks could provide businesses and politicians with significant insight, since it reflects people’s opinions about certain topics, news, and products. This has especially become relevant recently because sarcastic texts have been trending on social networks and are being posted by millions of active users. As a result of this situation, there is now an increasing amount of research on the detection of sarcasm in social network posts. Many works have been published on sarcasm detection, and they include a wide variety of techniques based on rules, lexicons, traditional machine learning, deep learning, and transformers. However, sarcasm detection is a challenging task due to the ambiguity and non-straightforward nature of sarcastic text. In addition, very few reviews have been conducted on the research in this area. Therefore, this systematic review mainly aims at exploring the newly published sarcasm detection articles on social networks in the years between 2019 and 2022. Several databases were extensively searched, and 30 articles that met the criteria were included. The selected articles were reviewed based on their approaches, datasets, and evaluation metrics. The findings emphasized that deep learning is the most commonly used technique for sarcasm detection in recent literature, and Twitter and F-measure are the most used source and performance metric, respectively. Finally, this article presents a brief discussion regarding the challenges in sarcasm detection and future research directions.