Sarcasm Detection on News Headlines Using Transformers

Abstract

Sarcasm poses a linguistic challenge due to its figurative nature, where intended meaning contradicts literal interpretation. Sarcasm is prevalent in human communication, affecting interactions in literature, social media, news, e-commerce, etc. Identifying the true intent behind sarcasm is challenging but essential for applications in sentiment analysis. Detecting sarcasm in written text, as a challenging task, has attracted many researchers in recent years. This paper attempts to detect sarcasm in news headlines. Journalists prefer using sarcastic news headlines as they seem much more interesting to the readers. In the proposed methodology, we experimented with Transformers, namely the BERT model, and several Machine and Deep Learning models with different word and sentence embedding methods. The proposed approach inherently requires high-performance resources due to the use of large-scale pre-trained language models such as BERT. We also extended an existing news headlines dataset for sarcasm detection using augmentation techniques and annotating it with hand-crafted features. The proposed methodology could outperform almost all existing sarcasm detection approaches with a 98.86% F1-score when applied to the extended news headlines dataset, which we made publicly available on GitHub.