Sememe knowledge and auxiliary information enhanced approach for sarcasm detection

Sarcasm expression is a pervasive literary technique in which people intentionally express the opposite of what is implied. Accurate detection of sarcasm in a text can facilitate the understanding of speakers’ true intentions and promote other natural language processing tasks, especially sentiment analysis tasks. Since sarcasm is a kind of implicit sentiment expression and speakers deliberately confuse the audience, it is challenging to detect sarcasm only by text. Existing approaches based on machine learning and deep learning achieved unsatisfactory performance when handling sarcasm text with complex expression or needing specific background knowledge to understand. Especially, due to the characteristics of the Chinese language itself, sarcasm detection in Chinese is more difficult. To alleviate this dilemma on Chinese sarcasm detection, we propose a sememe and auxiliary enhanced attention neural model, SAAG. At the word level, we introduce sememe knowledge to enhance the representation learning of Chinese words. Sememe is the minimum unit of meaning, which is a fine-grained portrayal of a word. At the sentence level, we leverage some auxiliary information, such as the news title, to learning the representation of the context and background of sarcasm expression. Then, we construct the representation of text expression progressively and dynamically. The evaluation on a sarcasm dateset, consisting of comments on news text, reveals that our proposed approach is effective and outperforms the state-of-the-art models.