Multilingual Irony Detection with Dependency Syntax and Neural Models
This work addresses the problem of improving irony detection for natural language processing applications, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods and datasets.
The paper tackled irony detection in multiple languages by evaluating dependency-based syntactic features, finding that such features improve detection performance across English, Spanish, French, and Italian.
This paper presents an in-depth investigation of the effectiveness of dependency-based syntactic features on the irony detection task in a multilingual perspective (English, Spanish, French and Italian). It focuses on the contribution from syntactic knowledge, exploiting linguistic resources where syntax is annotated according to the Universal Dependencies scheme. Three distinct experimental settings are provided. In the first, a variety of syntactic dependency-based features combined with classical machine learning classifiers are explored. In the second scenario, two well-known types of word embeddings are trained on parsed data and tested against gold standard datasets. In the third setting, dependency-based syntactic features are combined into the Multilingual BERT architecture. The results suggest that fine-grained dependency-based syntactic information is informative for the detection of irony.