---
title: "#Irony or #Sarcasm –- A Quantitative and Qualitative Study Based on Twitter — paper by Wang (2013)"
description: "The author therefore proposes that irony has two senses, with the event-labelling sense dominant. 25 references, cited by 7 papers here."
authors: ["Po-Ya Angela Wang"]
year: 2013
venue: "Proceedings of the 27th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation (PACLIC 27)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/Y13-1035/"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/wang-2013-irony-or-sarcasm-quantitative-qualitative/"
---
[Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/wang-2013-irony-or-sarcasm-quantitative-qualitative/)

[home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2013](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2013/page/2/) / #Irony or #Sarcasm –- A Quantitative and Qualitative Study Based on Twitter

# #Irony or #Sarcasm –- A Quantitative and Qualitative Study Based on Twitter

**Authors:** Po-Ya Angela Wang · **Year:** 2013 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 27th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation (PACLIC 27)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/paclic/) ([PACLIC 2013](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/paclic/2013/)) · **Publisher:** [Department of English, National Chengchi University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/department-of-english-national-chengchi-university/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/Y13-1035/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/Y13-1035.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W848438165)

**Citations:** 51 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [7](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/wang-2013-irony-or-sarcasm-quantitative-qualitative/cited-by/) in our library, of the 141,840 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The paper asks whether irony and sarcasm are actually distinct, and how. Computational work has mostly merged them, even though psycholinguistic (Lee and Katz 1998) and qualitative (Clift 1999) studies suggest that only sarcasm is truly hostile. Wang studies the question from the speaker's side, using naturally occurring Twitter posts that users themselves tagged #irony or #sarcasm. Two methods are combined. A quantitative sentiment analysis compares the emotional polarity of the two tweet groups. A qualitative content analysis then examines targets, speaker awareness and overlap. Sarcastic tweets carry more positive sentiment, which the author reads as aggression disguised by pleasant wording. Ironic tweets lean neutral and mostly describe an event the writer judges ironic. Some tweets, though, show irony used just like sarcasm, aggressive and self-aware, and a few carry both tags. The author therefore proposes that irony has two senses, with the event-labelling sense dominant. The distinction matters for opinion mining, where merging the two labels can misread what speakers intend.

## Key points
- Data are tweets self-labelled by their authors with #irony or #sarcasm. They are analysed as speaker production "in the wild" rather than as hearer responses to designed materials.
- Four research questions are posed:
  - Is sarcasm more aggressive?
  - Does sarcasm, unlike irony, attack a specific target?
  - Are tweeters aware of their own sarcasm or irony?
  - Do the two categories overlap?
- The first question is tested with sentiment analysis and the other three with content analysis.
- Sentiment results: #sarcasm tweets score more positive and #irony tweets more neutral. Content analysis agrees: sarcastic tweets are mostly subjective self-utterances, while ironic tweets mostly describe events.
- Irony is proposed to have two senses:
  - Sense 1 is equivalent to sarcasm: aggressive, self-aware, and possibly aimed at a target.
  - Sense 2 classifies an event as ironic: non-aggressive and without speaker awareness.
- A tweet carrying both tags (water coming out of a smoke alarm, followed by an emoticon and "cool!") is taken as evidence that the two terms are interchangeable. The author argues against Clift's view that irony is the hypernym of sarcasm.

## Interesting ideas
- Author-applied hashtags serve as labels that reflect the speaker's own intent, rather than an annotator's interpretation of it, which gives cheap and perspective-specific supervision.
- Irony is split into a verbal, targeted, aggressive use and a use that marks a situation as ironic (an expectation violated). This separates two phenomena that one flat label would blur.
- Sarcasm is read as positive surface wording laid over a hostile intent, so a clash between positive lexical polarity and a negative described situation becomes a cue.
- The description, the emoticon and the comment are interpreted together as one utterance rather than split into parts that each "cause" a tag.
- Aggregate sentiment statistics are cross-checked against close reading of individual examples, and conclusions are drawn only where the two agree.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (learn): Self-labelled web text could act as an extra noisy witness for silver data on speech acts and irony, as long as the labels are treated as speaker claims rather than gold truth.
- **I2** (frames): The irony module in prag could output distinct frames, one for a speaker attacking a target via insincere praise and one for a narrated event judged ironic, each with its own explanation.
- **I3** (frames): Implicature rules could flag sarcasm when a positive evaluative word attaches to an event the world model marks as bad, such as water leaking from an alarm.
- **I4** (tokens): The tokenizer should keep emoticons, hashtags and interjections as typed tokens so that later stages can attach them to the whole utterance as stance cues.
- **I5** (learn): Evaluation reports could pair each metric with a small inspected sample of cases, catching cases where a score looks right for the wrong reasons.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [National Taiwan University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/national-taiwan-university/) — University, Taipei, Taiwan · 13 works · 1,886 citations

📚 Shelves (5): [🖥️ Computer Science](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/) · 9,086 works · [🤖 Artificial Intelligence](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/artificial-intelligence/) · 8,889 works · [💭 Psychology](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/psychology/) · 798 works · [💭 Social Psychology](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/psychology/social-psychology/) · 129 works · [🖱️ Human-Computer Interaction](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/human-computer-interaction/) · 61 works

🧭 Topics (1): [😊 Sentiment & emotion](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/sentiment-emotion/) · 608 works

## Cite

Cite as: Po-Ya Angela Wang. 2013. #Irony or #Sarcasm –- A Quantitative and Qualitative Study Based on Twitter. Proceedings of the 27th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation (PACLIC 27).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{wang2013irony,
  title = {{\#Irony or \#Sarcasm –- A Quantitative and Qualitative Study Based on Twitter}},
  author = {Po-Ya Angela Wang},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 27th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information, and Computation (PACLIC 27)},
  year = {2013},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/Y13-1035/}
}
```

- [← previous Dialogue Act Recognition in Synchronous and Asynchronous Conversations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/tavafi-2013-dialogue-act-recognition-synchronous-asynchronous/)
- [next → Latent Anaphora Resolution for Cross-Lingual Pronoun Prediction](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hardmeier-2013-latent-anaphora-resolution-cross-lingual/)
- [↑ back to papers of 2013](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2013/page/2/)

## References

25 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Albert N. Katz. 2000. Introduction to the Special Issue: The Uses and Processing of Irony and Sarcasm. Metaphor and Symbol, 15:1-2, 1-3 [↗](https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2000.9678861)
2. Antonio Reyes, Paolo Rosso, and Tony Veale.2013. Multidimensional Approach for Detecting Irony in Twitter. Lang Resources and Evaluation, 47:239– 268 [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Antonio+Reyes%2C+Paolo+Rosso%2C+and+Tony+Veale%2E2013%2E+Multidimensional+Approach+for+Detecting+Irony+in+Twitter%2E+Lang+Resources+and+Evaluation%2C+47%3A239%E2%80%93+268)
3. Bowes Andrea and Albert Katz .2011. When Sarcasm Stings. Discourse Processes, 48:4, 215-236 [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Bowes+Andrea+and+Albert+Katz+%2E2011%2E+When+Sarcasm+Stings%2E+Discourse+Processes%2C+48%3A4%2C+215%2D236)
4. C.Burfoot and T. Baldwin. 2009. Automatic Satire Detection: Are You Having a Laugh? In: ACL-IJCNLP ’09: Proceedings of the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 conference short papers, 161–164. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=C%2EBurfoot+and+T%2E+Baldwin%2E+2009%2E+Automatic+Satire+Detection%3A+Are+You+Having+a+Laugh%3F+In%3A+ACL%2DIJCNLP+%E2%80%9909%3A+Proceedings+of+the+ACL%2DIJCNLP+2009+conference+short+papers%2C+161%E2%80%93164%2E)
5. Christopher J. Lee and Albert N. Katz.1998. The Differential Role of Ridicule in Sarcasm and Irony. Metaphor and Symbol, 13(1): 1-15 [↗](https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327868ms1301_1)
6. D. Sperber and D.Wilson. 1981. Irony and the Use-mention Distinction. In P. Cole (ed), Radical Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, 295–318. D. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=D%2E+Sperber+and+D%2EWilson%2E+1981%2E+Irony+and+the+Use%2Dmention+Distinction%2E+In+P%2E+Cole+%28ed%29%2C+Radical+Pragmatics%2E+New+York%3A+Academic+Press%2C+295%E2%80%93318%2E+D%2E)
7. Sperber and D.Wilson. 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Sperber+and+D%2EWilson%2E+1986%2E+Relevance%3A+Communication+and+Cognition%2E+Cambridge%2C+MA%3A+Harvard+University+Press%2E)
8. Elena Filatova. 2012. Irony and Sarcasm: Corpus Generation and Analysis Using Crowdsourcing. Presented in 8th International conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC) [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/filatova-2012-irony-sarcasm-corpus-generation-analysis/)
9. Gary Miner, John Elder IV , Thomas Hill, Robert Nisbet, Dursun Delen, and Andrew Fast. 2012. Practical Text Mining and Statistical Analysis for Non-structured Text Data Applications. Online reference: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/book/97801238 69791 [↗](https://doi.org/10.1016/c2010-0-66188-8)
10. Gregory Bryant and Jean E. Fox Tree. 2002. Recognizing Verbal Irony in Spontaneous Speech, Metaphor and Symbol, 17(2): 99-119. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Gregory+Bryant+and+Jean+E%2E+Fox+Tree%2E+2002%2E+Recognizing+Verbal+Irony+in+Spontaneous+Speech%2C+Metaphor+and+Symbol%2C+17%282%29%3A+99%2D119%2E)
11. H. H. Clark and R. J. Gerrig. 1984. On the pretense theory of irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 113: 121–126. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.113.1.121)
12. H. L.Colston. 1997. Salting a wound or sugaring a pill: The pragmatic functions of ironic criticism. Discourse Processes, 23: 25–45. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1080/01638539709544980)
13. H. L. Colston. 2000. On necessary Conditions for Verbal Irony Comprehension. Pragmatics and Cognition, 8(2), 277-324. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.8.2.02col)
14. H. P.Grice. 1975. Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J. L. Morgan (eds). Syntax and Semantics, Volume 3: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press, 41–58. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004368811_003)
15. J. Schwoebel, S. Dews, E. Winner, and K. Srinivas. 2000. Obligatory processing of the literal meaning of ironic utterances: Further evidence. Metaphor and Symbol, 15: 47–61. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2000.9678864)
16. Jr. R. Gibbs. 1986. On the psycholinguistics of sarcasm. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 115: 3-15 [↗](https://doi.org/10.1037//0096-3445.115.1.3)
17. Jr. R. Gibbs and J. O’Brien. 1991. Psychological aspects of irony understanding. Journal of Pragmatics, 16:523–530. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1016/0378-2166(91)90101-3)
18. J. R. Searle. 1978. Utterance Meaning. Erkenntnis 13: 207–224. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=J%2E+R%2E+Searle%2E+1978%2E+Utterance+Meaning%2E+Erkenntnis+13%3A+207%E2%80%93224%2E)
19. Minqing Hu and Bing Liu. Mining and Summarizing Customer Reviews. Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discoveryand Data Mining (KDD-2004), Aug 22-25, 2004, Seattle, Washington, USA. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Minqing+Hu+and+Bing+Liu%2E+Mining+and+Summarizing+Customer+Reviews%2E+Proceedings+of+the+ACM+SIGKDD+International+Conference+on+Knowledge+Discoveryand+Data+Mining+%28KDD%2D2004%29%2C+Aug+22%2D25%2C+2004%2C+Seattle%2C+Was)
20. Rebecca Clift. 1999. Irony in Conversation. Language in Society, 28:523–553 [↗](https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404599004029)
21. R. J. Kreuz, and S. Glucksberg. 1989. How to be Sarcastic: The Echoic Reminder theory of Verbal Irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 118:374–386. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1037//0096-3445.118.4.374)
22. R. J. Kreuz. 2000. The Production and Processing of Verbal Irony. Metaphor and Symbol, 15:1-2, 99-107 [↗](https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2000.9678867)
23. Roberto González-Ibáñez, Smaranda Muresan,and Nina Wacholder. 2011.Identifying Sarcasm in Twitter: A Closer Look. Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: short papers, 581–586 [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/ibanez-2011-identifying-sarcasm-twitter-closer-look/)
24. S. Kumon-Nakamura, S. Glucksberg, and M. Brown. 1995. How About Another Piece of Pie? The Allusional Pretense Theory of Discourse Irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 124: 3–21. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=S%2E+Kumon%2DNakamura%2C+S%2E+Glucksberg%2C+and+M%2E+Brown%2E+1995%2E+How+About+Another+Piece+of+Pie%3F+The+Allusional+Pretense+Theory+of+Discourse+Irony%2E+Journal+of+Experimental+Psychology%3A+General%2C+124%3A+3%E2%80%9321%2E)
25. S. McDonald. 2000. Neuropsychological studies of sarcasm. Metaphor and Symbol, 15:85–98. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1080/10926488.2000.9678866)

*Updated 24 October 2026*