Sarcasm Detection in a Disaster Context
Tiberiu Sosea Junyi Jessy Li Cornelia Caragea
During natural disasters, people often use social media platforms such as
Twitter to ask for help, to provide information about the disaster situation,
or to express contempt about the unfolding event or public policies and
guidelines. This contempt is in some cases expressed as sarcasm or irony.
Understanding this form of speech in a disaster-centric context is essential to
improving natural language understanding of disaster-related tweets. In this
paper, we introduce HurricaneSARC, a dataset of 15,000 tweets annotated for
intended sarcasm, and provide a comprehensive investigation of sarcasm
detection using pre-trained language models. Our best model is able to obtain
as much as 0.70 F1 on our dataset. We also demonstrate that the performance on
HurricaneSARC can be improved by leveraging intermediate task transfer
learning. We release our data and code at
https://github.com/tsosea2/HurricaneSarc.