A Multimodal Corpus for Emotion Recognition in Sarcasm
This work addresses the challenge of understanding underlying emotions in sarcasm, which is important for improving emotion and sarcasm analysis in AI applications, though it is incremental as it builds on an existing dataset.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting emotions in sarcastic statements, which is previously unexplored, by creating an enriched multimodal dataset (MUStARD++) with corrected labels and new annotations, and establishes a benchmark for exact emotion recognition in sarcasm that outperforms state-of-the-art sarcasm detection.
While sentiment and emotion analysis have been studied extensively, the relationship between sarcasm and emotion has largely remained unexplored. A sarcastic expression may have a variety of underlying emotions. For example, "I love being ignored" belies sadness, while "my mobile is fabulous with a battery backup of only 15 minutes!" expresses frustration. Detecting the emotion behind a sarcastic expression is non-trivial yet an important task. We undertake the task of detecting the emotion in a sarcastic statement, which to the best of our knowledge, is hitherto unexplored. We start with the recently released multimodal sarcasm detection dataset (MUStARD) pre-annotated with 9 emotions. We identify and correct 343 incorrect emotion labels (out of 690). We double the size of the dataset, label it with emotions along with valence and arousal which are important indicators of emotional intensity. Finally, we label each sarcastic utterance with one of the four sarcasm types-Propositional, Embedded, Likeprefixed and Illocutionary, with the goal of advancing sarcasm detection research. Exhaustive experimentation with multimodal (text, audio, and video) fusion models establishes a benchmark for exact emotion recognition in sarcasm and outperforms the state-of-art sarcasm detection. We release the dataset enriched with various annotations and the code for research purposes: https://github.com/apoorva-nunna/MUStARD_Plus_Plus