Is Sarcasm Detection A Step-by-Step Reasoning Process in Large Language Models?

Elaborating a series of intermediate reasoning steps significantly improves the ability of large language models (LLMs) to solve complex problems, as such steps would evoke LLMs to think sequentially. However, human sarcasm understanding is often considered an intuitive and holistic cognitive process, in which various linguistic, contextual, and emotional cues are integrated to form a comprehensive understanding of the speaker's true intention, which is argued not be limited to a step-by-step reasoning process. To verify this argument, we introduce a new prompting framework called SarcasmCue, which contains four prompting strategies, viz. chain of contradiction (CoC), graph of cues (GoC), bagging of cues (BoC) and tensor of cues (ToC), which elicits LLMs to detect human sarcasm by considering sequential and non-sequential prompting methods. Through a comprehensive empirical comparison on four benchmarking datasets, we show that the proposed four prompting methods outperforms standard IO prompting, CoT and ToT with a considerable margin, and non-sequential prompting generally outperforms sequential prompting.