Detecting Ironic Intent in Creative Comparisons

  • Authors:
  • Tony Veale;Yanfen Hao

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin, Ireland, email: {tony.veale,yanfen.hao}@ucd.ie;School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin, Ireland, email: {tony.veale,yanfen.hao}@ucd.ie

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2010 conference on ECAI 2010: 19th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Irony is an effective but challenging mode of communication that allows a speaker to express sentiment-rich viewpoints with concision, sharpness and humour. Irony is especially common in online documents that express subjective and deeply-felt opinions, and thus represents a significant obstacle to the accurate analysis of sentiment in web texts. In this paper we look at one commonly used framing device for linguistic irony --the simile --to show how irony is often marked in ways that make it computationally feasible to detect. We conduct a very large corpus analysis of web-harvested similes to identify the most interesting characteristics of ironic comparisons, and provide an empirical evaluation of a new algorithm for separating ironic from non-ironic similes.