Distinguishing Sarcasm From Literal Language: Evidence From Books and Blogging

Abstract

Sarcasm production and comprehension have been traditionally described in terms of pragmatic factors. Lexical cues have received less attention, but they may be important potential indicators. A major obstacle to examining such features is determining sarcastic intent. One solution is to analyze statements explicitly marked as being sarcastic. This study examined Twitter postings marked with #sarcasm as well as dialog from Google Books containing the phrase "said sarcastically." We used word counting and part-of-speech tagging to compare specific lexical features of the explicitly-marked sarcastic statements to statements by the same author not marked as sarcastic. Our results broadly support the Lexical Cues Hypothesis-certain word-level cues, such as interjections and positive affect terms, are stereotypic of sarcasm. A model incorporating these features performed comparably to human raters in making sarcastic versus nonsarcastic judgments. This finding shows promise for future work toward automatically identifying sarcasm in text.

Default Sarcastic Interpretations: On the Priority of Nonsalient Interpretations

“…Specific and informative contextual information should not be involved so that pragmatic incongruity-any breach of pragmatic maxims or contextual misfit on the one hand (see Grice, 1975) and supportive biasing information on the other (e.g., Campbell & Katz, 2012;Gibbs, 1981Gibbs, , 1986aGibbs, , 1986bGibbs, , 1994Katz, Blasko, & Kazmerski, 2004)-may not invite a nonliteral (or literal) interpretation. Contextual or pragmatic cues such as explicit discourse markers (metaphorically speaking, sarcastically speaking, literally, see, e.g., Katz & Ferretti, 2003;Kovaz, Kreuz, & Riordan, 2013); explicit interjections such as gee or gosh, shown to cue sarcastic interpretation (e.g., Kovaz et al, 2013;Kreuz & Caucci, 2007;Utsumi, 2000); and marked intonation/prosodic cues, whether nonliteral, such as sarcastic, effective even outside of a specific context (Bryant & Fox Tree, 2002;Rockwell, 2000Rockwell, , 2007Voyer & Techentin, 2010), or corrective, such as assigned to metalinguistic negation (Carston, 1996;Chapman, 1993Chapman, , 1996Horn, 1985Horn, , 1989, or nonverbal (such as gestures or facial expressions; e.g., Caucci & Kreuz, 2012), should be avoided, so that nonliteralness would neither be invited nor blocked.…”

Automatic detection of satire in Twitter: A psycholinguistic-based approach

“… Figure 13. Examples of tweets containing hyperbole  Adverbs ("Adverb") are also a good indicator of satirical tweets, and are used to exaggerate or to minimize a statement [55]. In the case of the tweets presented in Figure 14, the adverbs "tan" and "muy" were used to intensify the meaning.…”

Effective Ways of Teaching Pragmatics: Humor in the Classroom

“…This category includes markers such as exclamations, tag questions, negations, focus topicalization, elongation and diminutives. By showing the dissociative or hesitative stance of the communicator, these markers draw attention to the ironic nature of a statement (Kovaz et al 2013); (3) schematic markers, which are based on schemes like fi gures that deal with word order and sound patterns: a deviation from the ordinary arrangement of words and sounds, like alliteration and rhyme; and (4) other tropes, which are rhetorical fi gures that focus on meaning operation, in that readers should reinterpret the propositional ("literal") meaning of the utterance. 4) Teachers were given a survey where they could report about their experience in these fi ve classes and about their views about what could be done in order to improve/facilitate students' understanding/learning about the pragmatic issues involved in the activity presented.…”