R2D2 at SemEval-2022 Task 6: Are language models sarcastic enough? Finetuning pre-trained language models to identify sarcasm

Abstract

This paper describes our system used for SemEval 2022 Task 6: iSarcasmEval: Intended Sarcasm Detection in English and Arabic. We participated in all subtasks based on only English datasets. Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have become a de-facto approach for most natural language processing tasks. In our work, we evaluate the performance of these models for identifying sarcasm. For Subtask A and Subtask B, we used simple finetuning on PLMs. For Subtask C, we propose a Siamese network architecture trained using a combination of cross-entropy and distance-maximisation loss. Our model was ranked 7th in Subtask B, 8th in Subtask C (English), and performed well in Subtask A (English). In our work, we also present the comparative performance of different PLMs for each Subtask.