Sarcasm is a form of verbal irony that is intended to express contempt or ridicule. Huge amounts of text on internet, especially tweets, social networks, blogs etc. are sarcastic in nature. Persons and organizations need to know what people think and write about them in the electronic media. Scale warrants automation of such tasks. This talk will present our multi-faceted and long standing work on sarcasm detection, in the general setting of the currently highly important area of sentiment analysis and opinion mining, that hinges on the central notion of INCONGRUITY. A sentence like "I love being ignored" is sarcastic, because it has incongruity in it- "love" is a positive sentiment word, while "ignore" is negative. We exploit incongruity and many other features- traditional and novel- to detect sarcasm automatically. A new line of investigation by us is the use of eye tracking features for sarcasm detection: "Eyes give away what words do not tell". Many of our systems based on rich set of features and techniques including SVM, Deep Learning etc. report accuracies better than existing values. The talk is based on work that has been reported frequently in ACL, EMNLP, AAAI and such fora. Recently the speaker gave a tutorial on "Computational Sarcasm" with his PhD student Aditya Joshi in EMNLP 2017.
Prof. Pushpak Bhattacharyya is the recent past President of ACL (2016-17). He is the Director of IIT Patna and Vijay and Sita Vashee Chair Professor in IIT Bombay, Computer Science and Engineering Department. He was educated in IIT Kharagpur (B.Tech), IIT Kanpur (M.Tech) and IIT Bombay (PhD). He has been visiting scholar and faculty in MIT, Stanford, UT Houston and University Joseph Fouriere (France). Prof. Bhattacharyya’s research areas are Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and AI. He has guided more than 250 students (PhD, masters and Bachelors), has published more than 250 research papers and led government and industry projects of international and national importance. A significant contribution of his is Multilingual Lexical Knowledge Bases and Projection. Author of the text book ‘Machine Translation’ Prof. Bhattacharyya is loved by his students for his inspiring teaching and mentorship. He is a Fellow of National Academy of Engineering, Eminent Engineer awardee of Institute of Engineers India, recipient of Patwardhan Award of IIT Bombay and VNMM award of IIT Roorkey- both for technology development, and faculty grants of IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo and United Nations.