Handling figurative language like irony is currently a challenging task in natural language processing. Since irony is commonly used in user-generated content, its presence can significantly undermine accurate analysis of opinions and sentiment in such texts. Understanding irony is therefore important if we want to push the state-of-the-art in tasks such as sentiment analysis. In this research, we present the construction of a Twitter dataset for two languages, being English and Dutch, and the development of new guidelines for the annotation of verbal irony in social media texts. Furthermore, we present some statistics on the annotated corpora, from which we can conclude that the detection of contrasting evaluations might be a good indicator for recognizing irony.
@InProceedings{VANHEE16.6,
author = {Cynthia Van Hee and Els Lefever and Veronique Hoste}, title = {Exploring the Realization of Irony in Twitter Data}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)}, year = {2016}, month = {may}, date = {23-28}, location = {Portorož, Slovenia}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Marko Grobelnik and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Helene Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-9-1}, language = {english} }
Summary of the paper