DUCS at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Exploring Emojis and Sentiments for Sarcasm Detection

Abstract

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.