Natural language processing based features for sarcasm detection: An investigation using bilingual social media texts

The presence of sarcasm in text can hamper the performance of sentiment analysis. The challenge is to detect the existence of sarcasm in texts. This challenge is compounded when bilingual texts are considered, for example using Malay social media data. In this paper a feature extraction process is proposed to detect sarcasm using bilingual texts; more specifically public comments on economic related posts on Facebook. Four categories of feature that can be extracted using natural language processing are considered; lexical, pragmatic, prosodic and syntactic. We also investigated the use of idiosyncratic feature to capture the peculiar and odd comments found in a text. To determine the effectiveness of the proposed process, a non-linear Support Vector Machine was used to classify texts, in terms of the identified features, according to whether they included sarcastic content or not. The results obtained demonstrate that a combination of syntactic, pragmatic and prosodic features produced the best performance with an F-measure score of 0.852.