Sarcasm Over Time and Across Platforms: Does the Way We Express Sarcasm Change?

Abstract

Sarcasm is a sophisticated form of speech used to convey a message other than the apparent one. To date, there are numerous papers that have discussed the idea of automatic sarcasm detection and how it could be used for sentiment analysis improvement. The objective of this paper is to provide non-experts with a comprehensive overview of the state of research in this field and the main findings regarding sarcasm detection. Therefore, in this paper, we survey the state-of-the-art work done in this field, we recapitulate the research effort done, with focus on the more recent works, and we present the expected performance out of the proposed works. Nevertheless, we study in detail how this form of speech is used in different platforms, and how the way we express it evolves over time. We also discuss the proposition that suggests that sarcasm is a polarity switcher for sentiment analysis. To achieve these goals, we run some experiments on 3 different data sets, collected from 3 different platforms, and compare how sarcasm is employed in each. These platforms are Twitter, Reddit, and some news websites. Our experiments show that the way sarcasm is expressed is highly dependent on language mastery and the platform used. For instance, in the Twitter data set, whose users vary widely in age, language mastery, and understanding what sarcasm means, the overall precision of detection of sarcastic statement reaches 89.31%. In the reddit data set, the precision of detection of such statements is about 55.33%, and in the news data set, the precision reaches over 96.67%. Our experiments also show that, to a great extent, it is safe to affirm that sarcasm, when employed, switches the polarity of a given piece of text: for the 3 platforms presented above, sarcasm has been a polarity switcher for 89.3%, 89.1%, and 92.0% of their respective instances.

Keywords

• Deep learning
• machine learning
• sarcasm detection
• sentiment analysis