The present study examines single-word-utterances and focuses on (1) production patterns of irony as opposed to sincerity and (2) listeners’ ability to distinguish between the two without any contextual information. The results of the acoustic measurements show a lower average F0, less F0 variability, a smaller F0 range, lower intensity and longer durations for the ironic stimuli. The perceptio...

1. Traditional approaches to irony Here are some typical examples of verbal irony: (1) Mary (after a boring party): That was fun. (2) I left my bag in the restaurant, and someone kindly walked off with it. (3) Sue (to someone who has done her a disservice): I can't thank you enough. In each case, the point of the irony is to indicate that a proposition the speaker might otherwise be taken to en...

Verbal irony is characterized by the use of specific acoustic modulations, especially global prosodic cues as well as vowel hyperarticulation. Little is known concerning the expression of sarcastic speech in French. Here we report on global prosodic features of sarcastic speech in a corpus of declarative French utterances. Our data show that sarcastic productions are characterized by utterance ...

Irony and humour are just two of many forms of figurative language. Approaches to identify in vast volumes of data such as the internet humorous or ironic statements is important not only from a theoretical view point but also for their potential applicability in social networks or human-computer interactive systems. In this study we investigate the automatic detection of irony and humour in so...

This article approaches the question of mocking compliments and ironic praise from an interactional gender perspective. A statement such as "You're a real genius!" could easily be interpreted as a literal compliment, as playful humor or as an offensive insult. We investigate this thin line in the use of irony among adult men and women. The research introduces an interactional approach to irony,...

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...

This workshop aims to bring together researchers in cognitive science and computer science with a shared interest in irony. Irony detection is an especially difficult problem for natural language processing. Unlike other types of classification tasks, the difficulty of identifying irony is not alleviated by ‘throwing more data’ at the problem. Rather, it seems a different kind of data is needed...

The traditional theory of irony, which assumes that an ironist uses a figurative meaning opposite to the literal meaning of the utterance, is shown to be inadequate; an alternative theory is presented, which assumes that the ironist mentions the literal meaning of the utterance and expresses an attitude toward it. Although the implications for understanding irony are difficult to test, the two ...

Cynthia Van Hee, Els Lefever and Véronique Hoste LT3, Language and Translation Technology Team Ghent University Groot-Brittanniëlaan 45, 9000 Ghent, Belgium cynthia.vanhee, els.lefever, [email protected] Abstract Handling figurative language like irony is currently a challenging task in natural language processing. Since irony is commonly used in user-generated content, its presence can ...

Studies focusing on the comprehension of figurative language among schizophrenia patients (SZ) reveal their difficulties comprehending such language and their tendency to interpret it literally. The present study investigated hemispheric processing and comprehension of irony in 16 SZ patients and 18 typically developing (TD) adults. Two experimental tasks were used: an online divided visual fie...