Reactive Supervision: A New Method for Collecting Sarcasm Data
Summary
Sarcasm detection models need large labeled corpora. Existing ways of gathering such data each have drawbacks. Hashtag-based distant supervision is noisy and captures only the author's intent. Manual annotation and manual collection are slow, costly and capture a single perspective. The authors propose reactive supervision, which mines Twitter conversations for cue replies containing the phrase "being sarcastic." The grammatical person of the cue (I / you / s/he) is mapped to a regular expression over the thread's author sequence. This locates the sarcastic tweet unambiguously. First-person cues mark intended sarcasm, while second- and third-person cues mark perceived sarcasm. The resulting SPIRS dataset also includes the oblivious reply (a reader who missed the sarcasm) and the eliciting tweet. Manual checks show labeling accuracy of about 97–98.5%. Baselines with CNN, BiLSTM and BERT cover three tasks: sarcasm detection, context-aware detection and a new intended-vs-perceived perspective task. The resource matters because it is the first to provide both sarcasm perspectives and oblivious texts. The method could also be extended to emotion and sentiment data.
Key points
- Collection pipeline: The pipeline ran Fetch, Classify, Traverse and Match over 48 days in Oct–Nov 2019. It gathered 65K cue tweets, and 77% were discarded as unclassifiable.
- SPIRS contents: The dataset holds 15,000 English sarcastic tweets, split into 10,300 intended and 4,700 perceived (3,000 second-person, 1,700 third-person). It also includes 10,648 oblivious tweets, 9,156 eliciting tweets and 15,000 random negatives.
- Collection rate: The method gathered 312 tweets/day, compared with 171/day for #sarcasm distant supervision, an 82% improvement.
- Sarcasm detection: BERT reaches 70.3% accuracy on SPIRS. The Ptáček dataset scores higher (86.6%), which the authors attribute to locale confounding between its classes.
- Context and perspective: A three-BiLSTM context model achieves 74.7% accuracy. Dropping oblivious tweets cuts accuracy to 71.4% and MCC from 0.398 to 0.275. On perspective classification, BERT reaches 68.2% accuracy (MCC 0.366).
Cited by
- Sarcasm Detection is Way Too Easy! An Empirical Comparison of Human and Machine Sarcasm Detection
- SemEval-2022 Task 6: iSarcasmEval, Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic
- A Survey in Automatic Irony Processing: Linguistic, Cognitive, and Multi-X Perspectives
Cite
@inproceedings{shmueli2020reactive,
title = {{Reactive Supervision: A New Method for Collecting Sarcasm Data}},
author = {Shmueli, Boaz and Ku, Lun-Wei and Ray, Soumya},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)},
year = {2020},
doi = {10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.201},
eprint = {2009.13080},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.201}
}References
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