EMODIS: A Benchmark for Context-Dependent Emoji Disambiguation in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world communication settings, yet their ability to resolve context-dependent ambiguity remains underexplored. In this work, we present EMODIS, a new benchmark for evaluating LLMs' capacity to interpret ambiguous emoji expressions under minimal but contrastive textual contexts. Each instance in EMODIS comprises an ambiguous sentence containing an emoji, two distinct disambiguating contexts that lead to divergent interpretations, and a specific question that requires contextual reasoning. We evaluate both open-source and API-based LLMs, and find that even the strongest models frequently fail to distinguish meanings when only subtle contextual cues are present. Further analysis reveals systematic biases toward dominant interpretations and limited sensitivity to pragmatic contrast. EMODIS provides a rigorous testbed for assessing contextual disambiguation, and highlights the gap in semantic reasoning between humans and LLMs.

IAE: Irony-based Adversarial Examples for Sentiment Analysis Systems

Adversarial examples, which are inputs deliberately perturbed with imperceptible changes to induce model errors, have raised serious concerns for the reliability and security of deep neural networks (DNNs). While adversarial attacks have been extensively studied in continuous data domains such as images, the discrete nature of text presents unique challenges. In this paper, we propose Irony-based Adversarial Examples (IAE), a method that transforms straightforward sentences into ironic ones to create adversarial text. This approach exploits the rhetorical device of irony, where the intended meaning is opposite to the literal interpretation, requiring a deeper understanding of context to detect. The IAE method is particularly challenging due to the need to accurately locate evaluation words, substitute them with appropriate collocations, and expand the text with suitable ironic elements while maintaining semantic coherence. Our research makes the following key contributions: (1) We introduce IAE, a strategy for generating textual adversarial examples using irony. This method does not rely on pre-existing irony corpora, making it a versatile tool for creating adversarial text in various NLP tasks. (2) We demonstrate that the performance of several state-of-the-art deep learning models on sentiment analysis tasks significantly deteriorates when subjected to IAE attacks. This finding underscores the susceptibility of current NLP systems to adversarial manipulation through irony. (3) We compare the impact of IAE on human judgment versus NLP systems, revealing that humans are less susceptible to the effects of irony in text.