Irony Detection in Twitter

This work proposes a novel model that explores the use of affective features based on a wide range of lexical resources available for English, reflecting different facets of affect, and shows that affective information helps in distinguishing among ironic and nonironic tweets.

Abstract

Irony has been proven to be pervasive in social media, posing a challenge to sentiment analysis systems. It is a creative linguistic phenomenon where affect-related aspects play a key role. In this work, we address the problem of detecting irony in tweets, casting it as a classification problem. We propose a novel model that explores the use of affective features based on a wide range of lexical resources available for English, reflecting different facets of affect. Classification experiments over different corpora show that affective information helps in distinguishing among ironic and nonironic tweets. Our model outperforms the state of the art in almost all cases.