Enhanced Semantic Representation Learning for Sarcasm Detection by Integrating Context-Aware Attention and Fusion Network

Abstract

Sarcasm is a sophisticated figurative language that is prevalent on social media platforms. Automatic sarcasm detection is significant for understanding the real sentiment tendencies of users. Traditional approaches mostly focus on content features by using lexicon, n-gram, and pragmatic feature-based models. However, these methods ignore the diverse contextual clues that could provide more evidence of the sarcastic nature of sentences. In this work, we propose a Contextual Sarcasm Detection Model (CSDM) by modeling enhanced semantic representations with user profiling and forum topic information, where context-aware attention and a user-forum fusion network are used to obtain diverse representations from distinct aspects. In particular, we employ a Bi-LSTM encoder with context-aware attention to obtain a refined comment representation by capturing sentence composition information and the corresponding context situations. Then, we employ a user-forum fusion network to obtain the comprehensive context representation by capturing the corresponding sarcastic tendencies of the user and the background knowledge about the comments. Our proposed method achieves values of 0.69, 0.70, and 0.83 in terms of accuracy on the Main balanced, Pol balanced and Pol imbalanced datasets, respectively. The experimental results on a large Reddit corpus, SARC, demonstrate that our proposed method achieves a significant performance improvement over state-of-art textual sarcasm detection methods.