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Chandler: An Explainable Sarcastic Response Generator

Summary

Earlier sarcasm generators assume that sarcasm simply means the opposite of what is said. The authors argue this assumption is neither necessary nor sufficient for sarcasm. Instead, they build Chandler on Utsumi's Implicit Display Theory (IDT). IDT treats an utterance as sarcastic exactly when three conditions hold. There must be an ironic environment, meaning a speaker's expectation failed and they feel negatively about it. The utterance must also implicitly display that environment: it alludes to the failed expectation, is pragmatically insincere, and hints at the negative attitude.

Chandler first infers the ironic environment from an input utterance, then produces a sarcastic reply. Because each step follows the theory, the system can also explain why each reply counts as sarcastic. The authors see this transparency as important, since sarcasm can easily offend or be misread.

Crowdworkers on Prolific rated outputs for 250 inputs balanced by sentiment. Chandler was more sarcastic than DialoGPT-based systems and slightly less sarcastic than the template-based SarcasmBot. However, it was far more diverse and usually more specific to the input. This makes it a more realistic basis for sarcastic conversational agents.

Key points

  • The system is grounded in Implicit Display Theory (Utsumi, 1996), not the traditional "opposite meaning" view. The paper also reviews Gricean, echoic and pretense theories and finds them lacking.
  • There are four Chandler variants, each alluding to the failed expectation through a different relation type: Ch-xAttr, Ch-xNeed, Ch-xReact and Ch-xEffect.
  • The evaluation compared the variants with DialoGPT, DialoGPT+R3 and SarcasmBot. It used 250 inputs, 3 annotations per input, and 0–4 scales for sarcasm, humour, coherence and specificity.
  • Ch-xAttr was the most sarcastic variant (2.1), against 2.5 for SarcasmBot and 0.6 for plain DialoGPT. Diversity, measured as the share of unique responses, was 0.80 for Ch-xAttr and Ch-xNeed versus 0.14 for SarcasmBot, which produced only 28 distinct replies.
  • A live demo is available, and the authors planned to release the code, model checkpoints, inputs and responses under CC BY-NC.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cited by

7 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 3 of them have a page here, 4 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-demo.38

@inproceedings{oprea2021chandler,
  title = {{Chandler: An Explainable Sarcastic Response Generator}},
  author = {Oprea, Silviu and Wilson, Steven and Magdy, Walid},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-demo.38},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-demo.38}
}

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