A Modular Architecture for Unsupervised Sarcasm Generation

Abhijit Mishra, Tarun Tater, Karthik Sankaranarayanan


Abstract
In this paper, we propose a novel framework for sarcasm generation; the system takes a literal negative opinion as input and translates it into a sarcastic version. Our framework does not require any paired data for training. Sarcasm emanates from context-incongruity which becomes apparent as the sentence unfolds. Our framework introduces incongruity into the literal input version through modules that: (a) filter factual content from the input opinion, (b) retrieve incongruous phrases related to the filtered facts and (c) synthesize sarcastic text from the incongruous filtered and incongruous phrases. The framework employs reinforced neural sequence to sequence learning and information retrieval and is trained only using unlabeled non-sarcastic and sarcastic opinions. Since no labeled dataset exists for such a task, for evaluation, we manually prepare a benchmark dataset containing literal opinions and their sarcastic paraphrases. Qualitative and quantitative performance analyses on the data reveal our system’s superiority over baselines built using known unsupervised statistical and neural machine translation and style transfer techniques.
Anthology ID:
D19-1636
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6144–6154
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1636
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1636
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abhijit Mishra, Tarun Tater, and Karthik Sankaranarayanan. 2019. A Modular Architecture for Unsupervised Sarcasm Generation. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 6144–6154, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Modular Architecture for Unsupervised Sarcasm Generation (Mishra et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1636.pdf