Interpreting Verbal Irony: Linguistic Strategies and the Connection to the Type of Semantic Incongruity


Ghosh, Debanjan, Musi, Elena ORCID: 0000-0003-2431-455X, Upasani, Kartikeya and Muresan, Smaranda (2019) Interpreting Verbal Irony: Linguistic Strategies and the Connection to the Type of Semantic Incongruity CoRR, abs/19 (9).

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Abstract

Human communication often involves the use of verbal irony or sarcasm, where the speakers usually mean the opposite of what they say. To better understand how verbal irony is expressed by the speaker and interpreted by the hearer we conduct a crowdsourcing task: given an utterance expressing verbal irony, users are asked to verbalize their interpretation of the speaker's ironic message. We propose a typology of linguistic strategies for verbal irony interpretation and link it to various theoretical linguistic frameworks. We design computational models to capture these strategies and present empirical studies aimed to answer three questions: (1) what is the distribution of linguistic strategies used by hearers to interpret ironic messages?; (2) do hearers adopt similar strategies for interpreting the speaker's ironic intent?; and (3) does the type of semantic incongruity in the ironic message (explicit vs. implicit) influence the choice of interpretation strategies by the hearers?

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: Accepted at Society for Computation in Linguistics (SCiL), 2020 Conference
Uncontrolled Keywords: cs.CL, cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG
Divisions: Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences > School of the Arts
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 30 Nov 2023 16:28
Last Modified: 24 Apr 2026 10:35
Open Access URL: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/scil/vol3/iss1/9/
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URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3177099
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