Modeling Satire in English Text for Automatic Detection

Abstract

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, satire is a trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly. Though it is an important language aspect used in everyday communication, the study of satire detection in natural text is often ignored. In this paper, we identify key value components and features for automatic satire detection. Our experiments have been carried out on three datasets, namely, tweets, product reviews and newswire articles. We examine the impact of a number of state-of-the-art features as well as new generalized textual features. By using these features, we outperform the state of the art by a significant 6% margin.