Sarcasm annotation extends beyond linguistic expertise, and often involves cultural context. This paper presents our first-of-its-kind study that deals with impact of cultural differences on the quality of sarcasm annotation. For this study, we consider the case of American text and Indian annotators. For two sarcasmlabeled datasets of American tweets and discussion forum posts that have been annotated by American annotators, we obtain annotations from Indian annotators. Our Indian annotators agree with each other more than their American counterparts, and face difficulties in case of unfamiliar situations and named entities. However, these difficulties in sarcasm annotation result in statistically insignificant degradation in sarcasm classification. We also show that these disagreements between annotators can be predicted using textual properties. Although the current study is limited to two annotators and one culture pair, our paper opens up a novel direction in evaluation of the quality of sarcasm annotation, and the impact of this quality on sarcasm classification. This study forms a stepping stone towards systematic evaluation of quality of these datasets annotated by non-native annotators, and can be extended to other culture combinations.

While there is a considerable body of research on the pragmatics of apology across the globe, the Indian apology discourse has received hardly any attention from scholars. Political apologies particularly, have been neglected as an important area of research in India. The act of tendering public political apologies, which was almost absent from the Indian repertoire, is an emerging trend in India. This article aims to identify the salient characteristics of Indian political apologies by contextual analysis of the apology texts and is a first of its kind as far as known to the authors. Indian political leaders use evasion and manipulation in apology utterances to avoid an explicit apology. The graver the transgression, the greater the hesitation to offer an explicit apology. We suggest that the categorization of political apologies should take into consideration the stature of the political apologizer also and not just the magnitude of the offence, as this can have a significant impact on the apology behaviour.