Identifying Sarcasm in Twitter: A Closer Look

Abstract

Sarcasm transforms the polarity of an apparently positive or negative utterance into its opposite. We report on a method for constructing a corpus of sarcastic Twitter messages in which determination of the sarcasm of each message has been made by its author. We use this reliable corpus to compare sarcastic utterances in Twitter to utterances that express positive or negative attitudes without sarcasm. We investigate the impact of lexical and pragmatic factors on machine learning effectiveness for identifying sarcastic utterances and we compare the performance of machine learning techniques and human judges on this task. Perhaps unsurprisingly, neither the human judges nor the machine learning techniques perform very well.