Let's talk (ironically) about the weather: Modeling verbal irony
نویسندگان
چکیده
Verbal irony plays an important role in how we communicate and express opinions about the world. While there exist many theories and empirical findings about how people use and understand verbal irony, there is to our knowledge no formal model of how people incorporate shared background knowledge and linguistic information to communicate ironically. Here we argue that a computational approach previously shown to model hyperbole (Kao, Wu, Bergen, & Goodman, 2014) can also explain irony once we extend it to a richer space of affective subtext. We then describe two behavioral experiments that examine people’s interpretations of utterances in contexts that afford irony. We show that by minimally extending the hyperbole model to account for two dimensions of affect—valence and arousal—our model produces interpretations that closely match humans’. We discuss the implications of our model on informal theories of irony and its relationship to other types of nonliteral language understanding.
منابع مشابه
Studying Irony Detection Beyond Ironic Criticism: Let's Include Ironic Praise
Studies of irony detection have commonly used ironic criticisms (i.e., mock positive evaluation of negative circumstances) as stimulus materials. Another basic type of verbal irony, ironic praise (i.e., mock negative evaluation of positive circumstances) is largely absent from studies on individuals' aptitude to detect verbal irony. However, it can be argued that ironic praise needs to be consi...
متن کاملPolarity Contrast for the Detection of Verbal Irony
In this paper, we propose two metrics capable of modeling forms of polarity contrast: polarity divergence and polarity dimorphism. To explore their potential usefulness to the detection of verbal irony and sentiment polarity, we performed an exploratory text analysis on a corpus of figurative tweets annotated by sentiment. The results of a text analysis show that, employing two different types ...
متن کاملRecognizing Verbal Irony in Spontaneous Speech
We explored the differential impact of auditory information and written contextual information on the recognition of verbal irony in spontaneous speech. Based on relevance theory, we predicted that speakers would provide acoustic disambiguation cues when speaking in situations that lack other sources of information, such as a visual channel. We further predicted that listeners would use this in...
متن کاملLet's talk about death: data collection for verbal autopsies in a demographic and health surveillance site in Malaysia
Background Verbal autopsies have gained considerable ground as an acceptable alternative to medically determined cause of death. Unlike with clinical or more administrative settings for data collection, verbal autopsies require significant involvement of families and communities, which introduces important social and cultural considerations. However, there is very little clear guidance about th...
متن کامل