This paper describes the participation of team DUCS at SemEval 2022 Task 6: iSarcasmEval -Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic. Team DUCS participated in SubTask A of iSarcasmEval which was to determine if the given English text was sarcastic or not. In this work, emojis were utilized to capture how they contributed to the sarcastic nature of a text. It is observed that emojis can augment or reverse the polarity of a given statement. Thus sentiment polarities and intensities of emojis, as well as those of text, were computed to determine sarcasm. Use of capitalization, word repetition, and use of punctuation marks like '!' were factored in as sentiment intensifiers. An NLP augmenter was used to tackle the imbalanced nature of the sarcasm dataset. Several architectures comprising of various ML and DL classifiers, and transformer models like BERT and Multimodal BERT were experimented with. It was observed that Multimodal BERT outperformed other architectures tested and achieved an F1-score of 30.71%. The key takeaway of this study was that sarcastic texts are usually positive sentences. In general emojis with positive polarity are used more than those with negative polarities in sarcastic texts.

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Identifying sarcasm is a challenging research problem owing to its highly contextual nature. Several researchers have attempted numerous mechanisms to incorporate context, linguistic aspects, and supervised and semi-supervised techniques to determine sarcasm. It has also been noted that emojis in a text may also hold key indicators of sarcasm. However, the availability of sarcasm datasets with emojis is scarce. This makes it challenging to effectively study the sarcastic nature of emojis. In this work, we present SarcOji which has been compiled from five publicly available sarcasm datasets. SarcOji contains labeled English texts which all have emojis. We also analyze SarcOji to determine if there is an incongruence in the polarity of text and emojis used therein. Further, emojis' usage, occurrences, and positions in the context of sarcasm are also studied in this compiled dataset. With SarcOji we have been able to demonstrate that frequency of occurrence of an emoji and its position are strong indicators of sarcasm. SarcOji dataset is now publicly available with several derived features like sentiment scores of text and emojis, most frequent emoji, and its position in the text. Compilation of the SarcOji dataset is an initial step to enable the study of the role of emojis in communicating sarcasm. SarcOji dataset can also serve as a go-to dataset for various emoji-based sarcasm detection techniques.

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