Sarcasm as Contrast between a Positive Sentiment and Negative Situation

A common form of sarcasm on Twitter con-sists of a positive sentiment contrasted with a negative situation. For example, many sarcas-tic tweets include a positive sentiment, such as “love ” or “enjoy”, followed by an expression that describes an undesirable activity or state (e.g., “taking exams ” or “being ignored”). We have developed a sarcasm recognizer to iden-tify this type of sarcasm in tweets. We present a novel bootstrapping algorithm that automati-cally learns lists of positive sentiment phrases and negative situation phrases from sarcastic tweets. We show that identifying contrast-ing contexts using the phrases learned through bootstrapping yields improved recall for sar-casm recognition. 1