Your sentiment precedes you: Using an author's historical tweets to predict sarcasm

Abstract

Sarcasm understanding may require information beyond the text itself, as in the case of 'I absolutely love this restaurant!' which may be sarcastic, depending on the contextual situation. We present the first quantitative evidence to show that historical tweets by an author can provide additional context for sarcasm detection. Our sarcasm detection approach uses two components: a contrast-based predictor (that identifies if there is a sentiment contrast within a target tweet), and a historical tweet-based predictor (that identifies if the sentiment expressed towards an entity in the target tweet agrees with sentiment expressed by the author towards that entity in the past).