Sarcasm explanation in multimodal dialogues

Abstract

Sarcasm is a means to convey ridicule or contempt. There has been a plethora of work in sentiment analysis, of which sarcasm is one of the most challenging tasks due to the incongruity between the surface level and the intended meaning of the sarcastic remark. In a dialogue setting, comprehending an ironic utterance is challenging, especially when the context is unclear. The classical studies primarily dealt with sarcasm detection tasks which considered the textual modality as the prime one. These works did well in sarcasm detection but failed to provide any explanation behind the elicited sarcasm, resulting from the lack of understanding and comprehension of a sarcastic utterance. The hidden semantic meaning of a sarcastic utterance is difficult to grasp without complete contextual clues, such as acoustic and visual signals. To this end, we explore the task of multimodal sarcasm explanation in dialogues, which deals with generating a natural language explanation for any given sarcastic instance. In this work, we are proposing the Explanans (What to explain) and Explanandum (what does the explaining) and follow various psychological theories to explain the satirical discourse. We show quantitative and qualitative analysis of the proposed model and discuss a possible future venture which can involve the incorporation of cognitive features as well.