How do we understand the experiences of characters in a movie? Similar to real life, viewers attribute mental states through process known as Theory Mind (ToM). Filmmakers commonly use Dramatic Irony, narrative device where audience knows something that at least one does not. From social neuroscience perspective, understanding cognitive mechanisms underlie dramatic irony can provide remarkable ...

We investigated children's understanding of irony and sensitivity to irony's meanness and humor. In Study 1, 89 participants (5-6-year-olds, 8-9-year-olds, adults) heard ironic and literal criticisms, and literal compliments. Comprehension of irony emerged between 5 and 6 years of age. Ratings of humor increased with age; ratings of meanness did not (showing that all ages perceived irony as mor...

Difficulties in understanding irony and sarcasm are part of the social cognition deficits in patients with schizophrenia. A number of studies have reported higher error rates during comprehension in patients with schizophrenia. However, the relationships of these impairments to schizotypal personality traits and other language deficits, such as the comprehension of proverbs, are unclear. We inv...

Irony is an effective but challenging mode of communication that allows a speaker to express sentiment-rich viewpoints with concision, sharpness and humour. Irony is especially common in online documents that express subjective and deeply-felt opinions, and thus represents a significant obstacle to the accurate analysis of sentiment in web texts. In this paper we look at one commonly used frami...

Emotional information is conveyed through verbal and nonverbal signals, with nonverbal cues often being considered the decisive factor in the judgment of others' emotional states. The aim of the present study was to examine how verbal and nonverbal cues are integrated by perceivers. More specifically, we tested whether the mismatch between verbal and nonverbal information was perceived as an ex...

IN THE PRESENT STUDY WE ADDRESSED TWO NOVEL QUESTIONS (1) is children's irony appreciation and processing related to their empathy skills? and (2) is children's processing of a speaker's ironic meaning best explained by a modular or interactive theory? Participants were thirty-one 8- and 9-year-olds children. We used a variant of the visual world paradigm to assess children's processing of iron...

Irony, a creative use of language, has received scarce attention from the computational linguistics research point of view. We propose an automatic system capable of detecting irony with good accuracy in the social network Twitter. Twitter allows users to post short messages (140 characters) which usually do not follow the expected rules of the grammar, users tend to truncate words and use part...

Kenya over the last few decades, and the change from a nomadic lifestyle to communally owned ranches, wildlife in the Samburu District is under threat from deforestation, land degradation, overgrazing by livestock, and unsustainable water use. Alexander Njue, who is also involved in a separate Earthwatchsponsored project studying the wildlife habitats in this area, hopes that wildlife can also ...

This paper presents a formal semantics of verbal irony in assertions. In particular, it makes precise what is meant by the common intuition that an ironic utterance expresses the opposite of its literal meaning. We start by considering cases of verbal irony that are marked by a particular prosodic tune in English. We then demonstrate that an extant model for intonational meaning can be extended...

Computational creativity is one of the central research topics of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing today. Irony, a creative use of language, has received very little attention from the computational linguistics research point of view. In this study we investigate the automatic detection of irony casting it as a classification problem. We propose a model capable of detecti...