CASCADE: Contextual Sarcasm Detection in Online Discussion Forums (1805.06413v1)

Abstract: The literature in automated sarcasm detection has mainly focused on lexical, syntactic and semantic-level analysis of text. However, a sarcastic sentence can be expressed with contextual presumptions, background and commonsense knowledge. In this paper, we propose CASCADE (a ContextuAl SarCasm DEtector) that adopts a hybrid approach of both content and context-driven modeling for sarcasm detection in online social media discussions. For the latter, CASCADE aims at extracting contextual information from the discourse of a discussion thread. Also, since the sarcastic nature and form of expression can vary from person to person, CASCADE utilizes user embeddings that encode stylometric and personality features of the users. When used along with content-based feature extractors such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), we see a significant boost in the classification performance on a large Reddit corpus.

• The paper presents CASCADE, a hybrid model integrating CNNs with user and discourse features derived from online discussion context to improve sarcasm detection.
• Empirical evaluation demonstrates that CASCADE achieves significantly better accuracy, reaching 79% on Reddit data, by effectively incorporating multi-faceted contextual information.
• This research highlights the importance of context in sarcasm detection and offers valuable insights for advancing sentiment analysis and affective computing systems.

CASCADE: Contextual Sarcasm Detection in Online Discussion Forums

The paper "CASCADE: Contextual Sarcasm Detection in Online Discussion Forums" presents a nuanced approach to the detection of sarcasm in online comments, underscoring the importance of integrating both content-based and contextual information. Sarcasm, inherently contextual and often devoid of explicit lexical markers, poses significant challenges in sentiment analysis systems. Existing methodologies primarily rely on lexical and syntactic cues, often failing to capture the implicit contextual knowledge that characterizes many sarcastic remarks in digital discourse.

The authors introduce CASCADE, a hybrid model that combines convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with contextual information derived from user embeddings and discourse features of online discussion forums. User embeddings are crafted from stylometric and personality features, fused via Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) to encapsulate behavioral traits indicative of sarcasm. Meanwhile, the discourse features are extracted from the sequential structure of comments in discussion threads, capturing topical and contextual nuances relevant to sarcasm detection.

In empirical evaluations on a large Reddit corpus, CASCADE shows a marked improvement over existing methods, like CUE-CNN and CNN-SVM, with accuracies reaching 79% on imbalanced data distributions. These results highlight the efficacy of incorporating multi-faceted contextual information, reflecting CASCADE’s robustness in real-world scenarios where sarcastic comments are less frequent.

The application of ParagraphVector for the generation of stylometric and discourse features facilitates capturing the inherent variability in user writing styles and forum discussions. The fusion of these features through CCA underscores the importance of multi-view learning in maximizing the informational yield from disparate data sources, resulting in a coherent representation of user identities and forum characteristics.

While CASCADE demonstrates significant advancement, the paper acknowledges challenges, especially in handling long contextual comments and users with sparse historical data. Future research directions include exploring sequential discourse modeling and expanding relational user networks to augment the contextual depth further.

The implications of this work extend beyond sarcasm detection, offering insights into the broader domain of affective computing and sentiment analysis. By tapping into both semantic and pragmatic dimensions, CASCADE paves the way for more nuanced and context-aware models that can adapt to the intricacies of human communication. Thus, this research contributes substantially to the evolution of intelligent systems capable of sophisticated language understanding.