'An Empirical, Quantitative Analysis of Differences between Sarcasm and Irony' is the title of the next event of the Linguistics Seminar Series. Roman Klinger, from University of Stuttgart, will deliver the seminar on Friday 17 March at 12:00 in Room 214, M.A. Vassalli Conference Centre - Gateway Building (GW214).

A variety of classification approaches for the detection of ironic or sarcastic messages has been proposed in the last decade to improve sentiment classification. However, despite the availability of psychologically and linguistically motivated theories regarding the difference between irony and sarcasm, these typically do not carry over to a use in predictive models; one reason might be that these concepts are often considered very similar.

In this presentation, Roman Klinger will discuss a data-driven, empirical analysis of Tweets and how authors label them as irony or sarcasm. The experiments suggest that authors do not use these concepts interchangeably and that differences can be detected with automatic methods with a surprisingly high accuracy.