On the difficulty of automatically detecting irony: beyond a simple case of negation

Abstract

It is well known that irony is one of the most subtle devices used to, in a refined way and without a negation marker, deny what is literally said. As such, its automatic detection would represent valuable knowledge regarding tasks as diverse as sentiment analysis, information extraction, or decision making. The research described in this article is focused on identifying key values of components to represent underlying characteristics of this linguistic phenomenon. In the absence of a negation marker, we focus on representing the core of irony by means of three conceptual layers. These layers involve 8 different textual features. By representing four available data sets with these features, we try to find hints about how to deal with this unexplored task from a computational point of view. Our findings are assessed by human annotators in two strata: isolated sentences and entire documents. The results show how complex and subjective the task of automatically detecting irony could be.