Ciron: a New Benchmark Dataset for Chinese Irony Detection
Summary
Work on irony detection has focused mostly on English, and Chinese has lacked labeled data suitable for training machine learning systems. Earlier Chinese resources, such as the NTU Irony Corpus, were built by searching for predefined lexical or syntactic cues. That approach limits coverage to those patterns, and in the NTU case it produced only positive examples. The authors address this gap with Ciron, a corpus of about 8.7K Weibo microblog posts collected without pattern-based preselection, so it covers a broader range of ironic and non-ironic language. Five native-speaker postgraduate annotators rated every post on a five-level scale, from not ironic to strongly ironic. They followed the reversal-based Irony Identification Procedure (IIP), and their agreement was moderate. To show the resource is usable, the team trained seven baseline classifiers, from classical models to neural ones including BERT. The paper presents Ciron as the first sizable, finely graded gold standard for Chinese irony detection. Such a resource can support downstream work like affective analysis and hate speech detection.
Key points
- Ciron contains about 8.7K posts from Weibo with private user data removed, and it is released at github.com/Christainx/Ciron.
- Each post received labels from five annotators aged 24–30, all native Chinese speakers, using a 5-point scale where 1 marks a post without irony, 2 marks irony as improbable, 3 means there is too little evidence to decide, 4 indicates weak irony, and 5 indicates strong irony.
- Annotation follows the IIP of Li et al. (2019), which treats irony as a reversal between literal and contextual meaning, and inter-annotator agreement reached a Fleiss' Kappa of 0.470.
- Baselines evaluated on the dataset are NB, LR, SVM, CNN, LSTM, BiLSTM-AT and BERT.
- For comparison, the earlier NTU Irony Corpus (Traditional Chinese, Yahoo Blog) holds 1,005 pattern-selected ironic posts and no negative examples.
Cited by
- EPIC: Multi-Perspective Annotation of a Corpus of Irony
- A Survey in Automatic Irony Processing: Linguistic, Cognitive, and Multi-X Perspectives
Cite
@inproceedings{xiang2020ciron,
title = {{Ciron: a New Benchmark Dataset for Chinese Irony Detection}},
author = {Xiang, Rong and Gao, Xuefeng and Long, Yunfei and Li, Anran and Chersoni, Emmanuele and Lu, Qin and Huang, Chu-Ren},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
year = {2020},
url = {https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.701/}
}References
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