Humor markers (original) (raw)

Humor and irony in interaction: From mode adoption to failure detection

2001

Abstract. A fundamental definitional problem is examined for humor and irony: in neither case can the subclasses of these phenomena be kept distinct. This indeterminacy is reduced to the indeterminacy of indirect speech and implicature, on which irony entirely and humor, at least largely, rely. The “performance” of humor and irony is investigated by examining the motivations for Ss to use irony and the responses that Hs produce to it, which range from mode adoption to ignoring it (deliberately or not).

Multimodal markers of irony and sarcasm

Humor - International Journal of Humor Research, 2000

Abstract Two studies using multimodal stimuli collected from television situation comedies show that there exist markers of irony and sarcasm which involve intonational and visual clues. Our first conclusion is that there exists no “ironical intonation” per se, but rather that ...

Testing the impact of paraverbal irony signals. Experimental study on verbal irony identification in face-to-face and computer-mediated communication

Psychology of Language and Communication, 2022

This paper reports the results of an experimental study with a between subject design (N = 122) whose aim was to compare irony comprehension rates in face-to-face (FTF) and computer-mediated communication (CMC), and examine the influence of paraverbal irony signals on irony identification rates. An irony comprehension test was intersemiotically translated to three conditions: FTF (n = 46), paraverbal signal-rich CMC (n = 30), and paraverbal signal-poor CMC (n = 46). The study adopted a relevance theoretic account of irony. There was a statistically significant difference between the signal-rich CMC and FTF conditions - irony identification rates were higher in the signal-rich CMC condition. The results are important since they suggest that paraverbal irony signals are not essential for correct irony identification if relevant contextual information is available, and the CMC medium is not only unlikely to be an obstacle in communicating the ironic intent, but with the addition of the...

Where is the humor in verbal irony?

HUMOR, 2014

Irony is often related to humor, both in spoken and written language. One possibility is that humor arises once people reconcile the incongruity between what speakers say and imply when using irony. Humor automatically emerges in these cases given the release of tension following a momentary sense of disparity. Our claim is that this proposal does not capture many of the dynamic complexities in real-world ironic discourse. We describe psychological research on irony understanding showing that ironic meanings are not always understood via a process of drawing conversational implicatures. Studies on people's spontaneous laughter when using irony suggest that the recognition of incongruity between what is said and implied is not necessary for eliciting humor. Laughter occurs at various places in conversation, and not necessarily at the end of speakers' utterances. People also laugh for reasons other than humor, such as to signal affiliation. Overall, finding the humor in irony ...

With 1 Follower I Must Be AWESOME :P." Exploring the Role of Irony Markers in Irony Recognition

Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

Conversations in social media often contain the use of irony or sarcasm, when the users say the opposite of what they really mean. Irony markers are the meta-communicative clues that inform the reader that an utterance is ironic. We propose a thorough analysis of theoretically grounded irony markers in two social media platforms: Twitter and Reddit. Classification and frequency analysis shows that for Twitter, typographic markers such as emoticons and emojis are the most discriminative markers to recognize ironic utterances, while for Reddit the morphological markers (e.g., interjections, tag questions) are the most discriminative.

The role of visual cues in detecting irony

Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 25, 2021

We present four studies that aimed at investigating the contribution of purely visual cues for the detection of irony. In Study 1-3, we presented, without any preceding context, remarks (criticisms and compliments) uttered with sincere and with ironic intent, in three modalities: in the V modality participants could read the comment and see speakers' facial expressions and bodily movements; in the A modality they could only hear the audio tracks of the uttered sentences; in the VA modality, both visual and auditory information were present. We found that purely visual cues were sufficient to discriminate the ironic intent of the speakers. In Study 4 we presented comments in the V modality, without showing the content of the remark: Accuracy in the detection of sarcasm dropped. We discuss that irony in Study 1-3 might have been recognized indirectly, by comparing the polarity of the remark with the polarity of the actors' attitude, and we interpret Study 4 data as casting some doubts on the idea that there exist visual cues that specifically convey the speaker's ironic intent.

Humor Markers in Computer Mediated Communication: Emotion Perception and Response

The Journal of Teaching English with Technology, 2019

This paper aimed at investigating humor in text-based computer mediated communication (CMC). To this end, 200 turns exchanged by a number of 50 English language teachers on Viber, a messaging application, were randomly selected and analyzed based on Adam’s (2012) classification of humor to examine emoticons, punctuation (question mark, exclamation mark, and ellipsis), laughter (textual and acronym), formatting (spelling variations, capital/small letters, and elongation), and explicit markers in the corpus. The findings showed that emoticons outweighed other humor markers while laughter rated the least used marker in the corpus.

Sarcastic Soulmates Intimacy and irony markers in socialmedia messaging

Verbal irony, or sarcasm, presents a significant technical and conceptual challenge when it comes to automatic detection. Moreover, it can be a disruptive factor in sentiment analysis and opinion mining, because it changes the polarity of a message implicitly. Extant methods for automatic detection are mostly based on overt clues to ironic intent such as hashtags, also known as irony markers. In this paper, we investigate whether people who know each other make use of irony markers less often than people who do not know each other. We trained a machinelearning classifier to detect sarcasm in Twitter messages (tweets) that were addressed to specific users, and in tweets that were not addressed to a particular user. Human coders analyzed the top-1000 features found to be most discriminative into ten categories of irony markers. The classifier was also tested within and across the two categories. We find that tweets with a user mention contain fewer irony markers than tweets not addressed to a particular user. Classification experiments confirm that the irony in the two types of tweets is signaled differently. The within-category performance of the classifier is about 91% for both categories, while cross-category experiments yield substantially lower generalization performance scores of 75% and 71%. We conclude that irony markers are used more often when there is less mutual knowledge between sender and receiver. Senders addressing other Twitter users less often use irony markers, relying on mutual knowledge which should lead the receiver to infer ironic intent from more implicit clues. With regard to automatic detection, we conclude that our classifier is able to detect ironic tweets addressed at another user as reliably as tweets that are not addressed at at a particular person.

Clues for detecting irony in user-generated contents: oh...!! it's so easy;-)

2009

Abstract We investigate the accuracy of a set of surface patterns in identifying ironic sentences in comments submitted by users to an on-line newspaper. The initial focus is on identifying irony in sentences containing positive predicates since these sentences are more exposed to irony, making their true polarity harder to recognize.

Humorous implications and meanings: a multimodal study of sarcasm in interactional humor

According to Bergen and Binstead (2001), humor is “the least understood of our cognitive capacities”, and since humor abuses inferences through linguistic imagery, it should be cognitive oriented. My talk aims at defining the relationship between humor and the human mind, as already pointed out in Cognitive Linguistics (Vandaele 2002; Feyaerts 2004; Veale et al. 2006; Ritchie 2006; Brône 2008; Brône and Feyaerts 2003). More specifically, I focus on underlining the importance of addressing sarcasm from the perspective of the linguistic mechanisms creating it. I base my results on a large corpus of examples drawn from two American TV-series: House M.D. and The Big Bang Theory. The examples are annotated using ELAN which allows a more fine-grained analysis of the data. Based on these results, I present a typology of sarcasm in the form of complex cognitive phenomena, ranging from metonymy and metaphor to figure-ground reversal. These sarcastic utterances are analyzed against the background of Clark’s (1996) layering model and Fauconnier’s (1984, 1994) mental spaces theory, as suggested by Brône’s (2008) unified account of humor, to show how the human mind creates and understands sarcasm. I show that this unified account can also be used to explain sarcastic utterances because it points out the importance of separating the discourse base space from the pretense space in which sarcasm takes place. The discourse base space represents the common ground between interlocutors, because the speakers must be confident enough of all the assumptions the hearers are most likely to draw in interaction. Given all the rich implications and meanings that it generates, I argue that sarcasm is a fundamental means of all types of meaning construction (Radden et al. 2007). References Bergen, Benjamin and Kim Binsted. 2003. The Cognitive Linguistics of Scalar Humor. In Michel Achard and Suzanne Kemmer (Eds.) Language, Culture, and Mind. Stanford: CSLI. Brône, Geert. 2008. Hyper and misunderstanding in interactional humor. Journal of Pragmatics, 40: 2027-2061. Brône, Geert and Kurt Feyaerts. 2003. The cognitive linguistics of incongruity resolution: Marked reference-point structures in humor. University of Leuven, Department of Linguistics preprint no. 205. Clark, Herbert H. 1996. Using language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fauconnier, Gilles. 1984. Espaces mentaux. Aspects de la construction du sens dans les langues naturelles. Paris: Les Editions de minuit. 78 Fauconnier, Gilles. 1994. Mental spaces. Aspects of meaning construction in natural language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Radden, Günter, Klaus-Michael Köpcke, Thomas Berg, and Peter Siemund. 2007. Introduction. The construction of meaning in language. In Aspects of meaning construction, Radden Günter, Köpcke Klaus-Michael, Berg Thomas, and Siemund Peter (Eds.): 1-15. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Ritchie, Graeme. 2006. Reinterpretation and viewpoints. Humor: The International Journal of Humor Research 19: 251-270. Vandaele, Jeroen. 2002. Humor mechanisms in film comedy: Incongruity and Superiority. Poetics Today, 23(2): 221-249. Veale, Tony, Kurt Feyaerts and Geert Brône. 2006. The cognitive mechanisms of adversarial humor. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research, 19(3): 305-338.