A Unified Theory of Irony and Its Computational Formalization

Summary

Computational linguistics had largely ignored irony, partly because older accounts treated it as simply saying the opposite of what is meant. Utsumi argues that earlier theories, including Gricean, echoic/mention, and allusional pretense theories, blur two separate questions: what makes an utterance ironic, and how a hearer recognizes it as ironic. He proposes a unified theory built on the notion of an "ironic environment." In this situation, a speaker held an expectation, the expectation failed, and the speaker now feels negatively about the gap between hope and reality.

An ironic utterance conveys this environment indirectly through three components:

alluding to the expectation,
deliberately violating a pragmatic principle (pragmatic insincerity),
hinting at the speaker's emotional attitude.

Hearers need to detect only two of the three components to read an utterance as ironic. The environment and its implicit display are formalized with situation theory (infons, supporting situations) combined with situation calculus and action theory. The paper offers no corpus or experiments. Its contribution is a framework precise enough to underpin NLP systems that interpret or generate irony.

Key points

An ironic environment is defined by three conditions over two time points t0 < t1. The speaker holds expectation E at t0, E has failed by t1, and the speaker has a negative attitude toward the resulting incongruity.
There are four environment types, depending on whether E stems from an intentional action A and on how E failed. These types are used to predict who becomes the victim of irony.
The "2-of-3" recognition criterion explains unintentional irony and the lack of a need for special intonational cues. Both findings are consistent with psycholinguistic results by Gibbs and O'Brien (1991).
Representation relies on Barwise's (1989) situation theory plus situation calculus, illustrated on five worked examples (e.g., the eaten pizza, the messy room).
Sarcasm is distinguished from irony by an explicit victim and a display of counterfactual pleased emotion. Sarcasm without allusion to an expectation counts as non-ironic sarcasm.

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

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

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{utsumi1996unified,
  title = {{A Unified Theory of Irony and Its Computational Formalization}},
  author = {Utsumi, Akira},
  booktitle = {COLING 1996 Volume 2: The 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1996},
  doi = {10.3115/993268.993334},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/993268.993334}
}

References

11 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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