Multilingual Irony Detection with Dependency Syntax and Neural Models

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.

Irony Detection in a Multilingual Context

This paper proposes the first multilingual (French, English and Arabic) and multicultural (Indo-European languages vs. less culturally close languages) irony detection system. We employ both feature-based models and neural architectures using monolingual word representation. We compare the performance of these systems with state-of-the-art systems to identify their capabilities. We show that these monolingual models trained separately on different languages using multilingual word representation or text-based features can open the door to irony detection in languages that lack of annotated data for irony.