Large language model (LLM) have become mainstream methods in the field of sarcasm detection. However, existing LLM methods face challenges in irony detection, including: 1. single-perspective limitations, 2. insufficient comprehensive understanding, and 3. lack of interpretability. This paper introduces the Collaborative Agent Framework for Irony (CAF-I), an LLM-driven multi-agent system designed to overcome these issues. CAF-I employs specialized agents for Context, Semantics, and Rhetoric, which perform multidimensional analysis and engage in interactive collaborative optimization. A Decision Agent then consolidates these perspectives, with a Refinement Evaluator Agent providing conditional feedback for optimization. Experiments on benchmark datasets establish CAF-I's state-of-the-art zero-shot performance. Achieving SOTA on the vast majority of metrics, CAF-I reaches an average Macro-F1 of 76.31, a 4.98 absolute improvement over the strongest prior baseline. This success is attained by its effective simulation of human-like multi-perspective analysis, enhancing detection accuracy and interpretability.
Sarcasm fundamentally alters meaning through tone and context, yet detecting it in speech remains a challenge due to data scarcity. In addition, existing detection systems often rely on multimodal data, limiting their applicability in contexts where only speech is available. To address this, we propose an annotation pipeline that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate a sarcasm dataset. Using a publicly available sarcasm-focused podcast, we employ GPT-4o and LLaMA 3 for initial sarcasm annotations, followed by human verification to resolve disagreements. We validate this approach by comparing annotation quality and detection performance on a publicly available sarcasm dataset using a collaborative gating architecture. Finally, we introduce PodSarc, a large-scale sarcastic speech dataset created through this pipeline. The detection model achieves a 73.63% F1 score, demonstrating the dataset's potential as a benchmark for sarcasm detection research.
Stance Detection (SD) has become a critical area of interest due to its applications in various contexts leading to increased research within NLP. Yet the subtlety and complexity of texts sourced from online platforms often containing sarcastic language pose significant challenges for SD algorithms in accurately determining the authors stance. This paper addresses this by employing sarcasm for SD. It also tackles the issue of insufficient annotated data for training SD models on new targets by conducting Cross-Target SD (CTSD). The proposed approach involves fine-tuning BERT and RoBERTa models followed by concatenating additional deep learning layers. The approach is assessed against various State-Of-The-Art baselines for SD demonstrating superior performance using publicly available datasets. Notably our model outperforms the best SOTA models on both in-domain SD and CTSD tasks even before the incorporation of sarcasm-detection pre-training. The integration of sarcasm knowledge into the model significantly reduces misclassifications of sarcastic text elements in SD allowing our model to accurately predict 85% of texts that were previously misclassified without sarcasm-detection pre-training on in-domain SD. This enhancement contributes to an increase in the models average macro F1-score. The CTSD task achieves performance comparable to that of the in-domain task despite using a zero-shot finetuning. We also reveal that the success of the transfer-learning framework relies on the correlation between the lexical attributes of sarcasm detection and SD. This study represents the first exploration of sarcasm detection as an intermediate transfer-learning task within the context of SD while also leveraging the concatenation of BERT or RoBERTa with other deep-learning techniques. The proposed approach establishes a foundational baseline for future research in this domain.
Interpreting figurative language such as sarcasm across multi-modal inputs presents unique challenges, often requiring task-specific fine-tuning and extensive reasoning steps. However, current Chain-of-Thought approaches do not efficiently leverage the same cognitive processes that enable humans to identify sarcasm. We present IRONIC, an in-context learning framework that leverages Multi-modal Coherence Relations to analyze referential, analogical and pragmatic image-text linkages. Our experiments show that IRONIC achieves state-of-the-art performance on zero-shot Multi-modal Sarcasm Detection across different baselines. This demonstrates the need for incorporating linguistic and cognitive insights into the design of multi-modal reasoning strategies. Our code is available at: https://github.com/aashish2000/IRONIC
Sarcasm is a challenge to sentiment analysis because of the incongruity between stated and implied sentiment. The challenge is exacerbated when the implication may be relevant to a specific country or geographical region. Pragmatic metacognitive prompting (PMP) is a cognition-inspired technique that has been used for pragmatic reasoning. In this paper, we harness PMP for explainable sarcasm detection for Australian and Indian English, alongside a benchmark dataset for standard English. We manually add sarcasm explanations to an existing sarcasm-labeled dataset for Australian and Indian English called BESSTIE, and compare the performance for explainable sarcasm detection for them with FLUTE, a standard English dataset containing sarcasm explanations. Our approach utilising PMP when evaluated on two open-weight LLMs (GEMMA and LLAMA) achieves statistically significant performance improvement across all tasks and datasets when compared with four alternative prompting strategies. We also find that alternative techniques such as agentic prompting mitigate context-related failures by enabling external knowledge retrieval. The focused contribution of our work is utilising PMP in generating sarcasm explanations for varieties of English.
Tokenization is a foundational step in most natural language processing (NLP) pipelines, yet it introduces challenges such as vocabulary mismatch and out-of-vocabulary issues. Recent work has shown that models operating directly on raw text at the byte or character level can mitigate these limitations. In this paper, we evaluate two token-free models, ByT5 and CANINE, on the task of sarcasm detection in both social media (Twitter) and non-social media (news headlines) domains. We fine-tune and benchmark these models against token-based baselines and state-of-the-art approaches. Our results show that ByT5-small and CANINE outperform token-based counterparts and achieve new state-of-the-art performance, improving accuracy by 0.77% and 0.49% on the News Headlines and Twitter Sarcasm datasets, respectively. These findings underscore the potential of token-free models for robust NLP in noisy and informal domains such as social media.
Sarcasm detection is challenging for both humans and machines. This work explores how model characteristics impact sarcasm detection in OpenAI's GPT, and Meta's Llama-2 models, given their strong natural language understanding, and popularity. We evaluate fine-tuned and zero-shot models across various sizes, releases, and hyperparameters. Experiments were conducted on the political and balanced (pol-bal) portion of the popular Self-Annotated Reddit Corpus (SARC2.0) sarcasm dataset. Fine-tuned performance improves monotonically with model size within a model family, while hyperparameter tuning also impacts performance. In the fine-tuning scenario, full precision Llama-2-13b achieves state-of-the-art accuracy and $F_1$-score, both measured at 0.83, comparable to average human performance. In the zero-shot setting, one GPT-4 model achieves competitive performance to prior attempts, yielding an accuracy of 0.70 and an $F_1$-score of 0.75. Furthermore, a model's performance may increase or decline with each release, highlighting the need to reassess performance after each release.
Sarcasm detection, as a crucial research direction in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), has attracted widespread attention. Traditional sarcasm detection tasks have typically focused on single-modal approaches (e.g., text), but due to the implicit and subtle nature of sarcasm, such methods often fail to yield satisfactory results. In recent years, researchers have shifted the focus of sarcasm detection to multi-modal approaches. However, effectively leveraging multi-modal information to accurately identify sarcastic content remains a challenge that warrants further exploration. Leveraging the powerful integrated processing capabilities of Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for various information sources, we propose an innovative multi-modal Commander-GPT framework. Inspired by military strategy, we first decompose the sarcasm detection task into six distinct sub-tasks. A central commander (decision-maker) then assigns the best-suited large language model to address each specific sub-task. Ultimately, the detection results from each model are aggregated to identify sarcasm. We conducted extensive experiments on MMSD and MMSD 2.0, utilizing four multi-modal large language models and six prompting strategies. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, with a 19.3% improvement in F1 score, without necessitating fine-tuning or ground-truth rationales.
Stance Detection (SD) on social media has emerged as a prominent area of interest with implications for social business and political applications thereby garnering escalating research attention within NLP. The inherent subtlety and complexity of texts procured from online platforms pose challenges for SD algorithms in accurately discerning the authors stance. Mostly the inclusion of sarcastic and figurative language drastically impacts the performance of SD models. This paper addresses this by employing sarcasm detection intermediate-task transfer learning tailored for SD. The proposed methodology involves the finetuning of BERT and RoBERTa and the concatenation of convolutional BiLSTM and dense layers. Rigorous experiments are conducted on publicly available datasets to evaluate our transfer-learning framework. The performance of the approach is assessed against various State-Of-The-Art baselines for SD providing empirical evidence of its effectiveness. Notably our model outperforms the best SOTA models even prior to sarcasm-detection pretraining. The integration of sarcasm knowledge into the model proves instrumental in mitigating misclassifications of sarcastic textual elements in SD. Our model accurately predicts 85% of texts that were previously misclassified by the model without sarcasm-detection pretraining thereby amplifying the average F1-score of the model. Our experiments also revealed that the success of the transfer-learning framework is contingent upon the correlation of lexical attributes between the intermediate task and the target task. This study represents the first exploration of sarcasm detection as an intermediate transfer-learning task in the context of SD and simultaneously uses the concatenation of BERT or RoBERTa with other deep-learning techniques establishing the proposed approach as a foundational baseline for future research endeavors in this domain.
Multimodal sarcasm detection leverages multimodal information, such as image, text, etc. to identify special instances whose superficial emotional expression is contrary to the actual emotion. Existing methods primarily focused on the incongruity between text and image information for sarcasm detection. Existing sarcasm methods in which the tendency of image encoders to encode similar images into similar vectors, and the introduction of noise in graph-level feature extraction due to negative correlations caused by the accumulation of GAT layers and the lack of representations for non-neighboring nodes. To address these limitations, we propose a Dual-Level Adaptive Incongruity-Enhanced Model (DAIE) to extract the incongruity between the text and image at both token and graph levels. At the token level, we bolster token-level contrastive learning with patch-based reconstructed image to capture common and specific features of images, thereby amplifying incongruities between text and images. At the graph level, we introduce adaptive graph contrast learning, coupled with negative pair similarity weights, to refine the feature representation of the model’s textual and visual graph nodes, while also enhancing the information exchange among neighboring nodes. We conduct experiments using a publicly available sarcasm detection dataset. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, outperforming several state-of-the-art approaches by 3.33% and 4.34% on accuracy and F1 score, respectively.
In the era of rapid digital communication, vast amounts of textual data are generated daily, demanding efficient methods for latent content analysis to extract meaningful insights. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer potential for automating this process, yet comprehensive assessments comparing their performance to human annotators across multiple dimensions are lacking. This study evaluates the reliability, consistency, and quality of seven state-of-the-art LLMs, including variants of OpenAI's GPT-4, Gemini, Llama, and Mixtral, relative to human annotators in analyzing sentiment, political leaning, emotional intensity, and sarcasm detection. A total of 33 human annotators and eight LLM variants assessed 100 curated textual items, generating 3,300 human and 19,200 LLM annotations, with LLMs evaluated across three time points to examine temporal consistency. Inter-rater reliability was measured using Krippendorff's alpha, and intra-class correlation coefficients assessed consistency over time. The results reveal that both humans and LLMs exhibit high reliability in sentiment analysis and political leaning assessments, with LLMs demonstrating higher internal consistency than humans. In emotional intensity, LLMs displayed higher agreement compared to humans, though humans rated emotional intensity significantly higher. Both groups struggled with sarcasm detection, evidenced by low agreement. LLMs showed excellent temporal consistency across all dimensions, indicating stable performance over time. This research concludes that LLMs, especially GPT-4, can effectively replicate human analysis in sentiment and political leaning, although human expertise remains essential for emotional intensity interpretation. The findings demonstrate the potential of LLMs for consistent and high-quality performance in certain areas of latent content analysis.
Sarcasm typically conveys emotions of contempt or criticism by expressing a meaning that is contrary to the speaker's true intent. Accurate detection of sarcasm aids in identifying and filtering undesirable information on the Internet, thereby reducing malicious defamation and rumor-mongering. Nonetheless, the task of automatic sarcasm detection remains highly challenging for machines, as it critically depends on intricate factors such as relational context. Most existing multimodal sarcasm detection methods focus on introducing graph structures to establish entity relationships between text and images while neglecting to learn the relational context between text and images, which is crucial evidence for understanding the meaning of sarcasm. In addition, the meaning of sarcasm changes with the evolution of different contexts, but existing methods may not be accurate in modeling such dynamic changes, limiting the generalization ability of the models. To address the above issues, we propose a relational context learning and multiplex fusion network (RCLMuFN) for multimodal sarcasm detection. Firstly, we employ four feature extractors to comprehensively extract features from raw text and images, aiming to excavate potential features that may have been previously overlooked. Secondly, we utilize the relational context learning module to learn the contextual information of text and images and capture the dynamic properties through shallow and deep interactions. Finally, we employ a multiplex feature fusion module to enhance the generalization of the model by penetratingly integrating multimodal features derived from various interaction contexts. Extensive experiments on two multimodal sarcasm detection datasets show that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.
This paper focuses on sarcasm detection, which aims to identify whether given statements convey criticism, mockery, or other negative sentiment opposite to the literal meaning. To detect sarcasm, humans often require a comprehensive understanding of the semantics in the statement and even resort to external commonsense to infer the fine-grained incongruity. However, existing methods lack commonsense inferential ability when they face complex real-world scenarios, leading to unsatisfactory performance. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework for sarcasm detection, which conducts incongruity reasoning based on commonsense augmentation, called EICR. Concretely, we first employ retrieval-augmented large language models to supplement the missing but indispensable commonsense background knowledge. To capture complex contextual associations, we construct a dependency graph and obtain the optimized topology via graph refinement. We further introduce an adaptive reasoning skeleton that integrates prior rules to extract sentiment-inconsistent subgraphs explicitly. To eliminate the possible spurious relations between words and labels, we employ adversarial contrastive learning to enhance the robustness of the detector. Experiments conducted on five datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of EICR.
In this paper, we reported our experiments with various strategies to improve code-mixed humour and sarcasm detection. We did all of our experiments for Hindi-English code-mixed scenario, as we have the linguistic expertise for the same. We experimented with three approaches, namely (i) native sample mixing, (ii) multi-task learning (MTL), and (iii) prompting very large multilingual language models (VMLMs). In native sample mixing, we added monolingual task samples in code-mixed training sets. In MTL learning, we relied on native and code-mixed samples of a semantically related task (hate detection in our case). Finally, in our third approach, we evaluated the efficacy of VMLMs via few-shot context prompting. Some interesting findings we got are (i) adding native samples improved humor (raising the F1-score up to 6.76%) and sarcasm (raising the F1-score up to 8.64%) detection, (ii) training MLMs in an MTL framework boosted performance for both humour (raising the F1-score up to 10.67%) and sarcasm (increment up to 12.35% in F1-score) detection, and (iii) prompting VMLMs couldn't outperform the other approaches. Finally, our ablation studies and error analysis discovered the cases where our model is yet to improve. We provided our code for reproducibility.
Detecting sarcasm effectively requires a nuanced understanding of context, including vocal tones and facial expressions. The progression towards multimodal computational methods in sarcasm detection, however, faces challenges due to the scarcity of data. To address this, we present AMuSeD (Attentive deep neural network for MUltimodal Sarcasm dEtection incorporating bi-modal Data augmentation). This approach utilizes the Multimodal Sarcasm Detection Dataset (MUStARD) and introduces a two-phase bimodal data augmentation strategy. The first phase involves generating varied text samples through Back Translation from several secondary languages. The second phase involves the refinement of a FastSpeech 2-based speech synthesis system, tailored specifically for sarcasm to retain sarcastic intonations. Alongside a cloud-based Text-to-Speech (TTS) service, this Fine-tuned FastSpeech 2 system produces corresponding audio for the text augmentations. We also investigate various attention mechanisms for effectively merging text and audio data, finding self-attention to be the most efficient for bimodal integration. Our experiments reveal that this combined augmentation and attention approach achieves a significant F1-score of 81.0% in text-audio modalities, surpassing even models that use three modalities from the MUStARD dataset.
Sarcasm detection is a significant challenge in sentiment analysis due to the nuanced and context-dependent nature of verbiage. We introduce Pragmatic Metacognitive Prompting (PMP) to improve the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in sarcasm detection, which leverages principles from pragmatics and reflection helping LLMs interpret implied meanings, consider contextual cues, and reflect on discrepancies to identify sarcasm. Using state-of-the-art LLMs such as LLaMA-3-8B, GPT-4o, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, PMP achieves state-of-the-art performance on GPT-4o on MUStARD and SemEval2018. This study demonstrates that integrating pragmatic reasoning and metacognitive strategies into prompting significantly enhances LLMs' ability to detect sarcasm, offering a promising direction for future research in sentiment analysis.
Despite large language models (LLMs) being known to exhibit bias against non-mainstream varieties, there are no known labeled datasets for sentiment analysis of English. To address this gap, we introduce BESSTIE, a benchmark for sentiment and sarcasm classification for three varieties of English: Australian (en-AU), Indian (en-IN), and British (en-UK). Using web-based content from two domains, namely, Google Place reviews and Reddit comments, we collect datasets for these language varieties using two methods: location-based and topic-based filtering. Native speakers of the language varieties manually annotate the datasets with sentiment and sarcasm labels. Subsequently, we fine-tune nine large language models (LLMs) (representing a range of encoder/decoder and mono/multilingual models) on these datasets, and evaluate their performance on the two tasks. Our results reveal that the models consistently perform better on inner-circle varieties (i.e., en-AU and en-UK), with significant performance drops for en-IN, particularly in sarcasm detection. We also report challenges in cross-variety generalisation, highlighting the need for language variety-specific datasets such as ours. BESSTIE promises to be a useful evaluative benchmark for future research in equitable LLMs, specifically in terms of language varieties. The BESSTIE datasets, code, and models are currently available on request, while the paper is under review. Please email [email omitted].
Pretrained transformer-based Language Models (LMs) are well-known for their ability to achieve significant improvement on NLP tasks, but their black-box nature, which leads to a lack of interpretability, has been a major concern. My dissertation focuses on developing intrinsically interpretable models when using LMs as encoders while maintaining their superior performance via prototypical networks. I initiated my research by investigating enhancements in performance for interpretable models of sarcasm detection. My proposed approach focuses on capturing sentiment incongruity to enhance accuracy while offering instance-based explanations for the classification decisions. Later, I developed a novel white-box multi-head graph attention-based prototype network designed to explain the decisions of text classification models without sacrificing the accuracy of the original black-box LMs. In addition, I am working on extending the attention-based prototype network with contrastive learning to redesign an interpretable graph neural network, aiming to enhance both the interpretability and performance of the model in document classification.
Multimodal sarcasm detection (MSD) is essential for various downstream tasks. Existing MSD methods tend to rely on spurious correlations. These methods often mistakenly prioritize non-essential features yet still make correct predictions, demonstrating poor generalizability beyond training environments. Regarding this phenomenon, this paper undertakes several initiatives. Firstly, we identify two primary causes that lead to the reliance of spurious correlations. Secondly, we address these challenges by proposing a novel method that integrate Multimodal Incongruities via Contrastive Learning (MICL) for multimodal sarcasm detection. Specifically, we first leverage incongruity to drive multi-view learning from three views: token-patch, entity-object, and sentiment. Then, we introduce extensive data augmentation to mitigate the biased learning of the textual modality. Additionally, we construct a test set, SPMSD, which consists potential spurious correlations to evaluate the the model's generalizability. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of MICL on benchmark datasets, along with the analyses showcasing MICL's advancement in mitigating the effect of spurious correlation.
Sarcasm is hard to interpret as human beings. Being able to interpret sarcasm is often termed as a sign of intelligence, given the complex nature of sarcasm. Hence, this is a field of Natural Language Processing which is still complex for computers to decipher. This Literature Survey delves into different aspects of sarcasm detection, to create an understanding of the underlying problems faced during detection, approaches used to solve this problem, and different forms of available datasets for sarcasm detection.