---
title: "Magnets for Sarcasm — Ghosh 2017"
description: "Sarcasm on Twitter often cannot be recognized from the tweet text alone, because the reader needs context and some sense of the author's attitude."
authors: ["Aniruddha Ghosh", "Tony Veale"]
year: 2017
venue: "Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/D17-1050/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/d17-1050"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ghosh-2017-magnets-sarcasm-making-sarcasm-detection/"
---
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# Magnets for Sarcasm: Making Sarcasm Detection Timely, Contextual and Very Personal

**Authors:** [Aniruddha Ghosh](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/aniruddha-ghosh/), [Tony Veale](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/tony-veale/) · **Year:** 2017 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/D17-1050/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/D17-1050.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/d17-1050](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/d17-1050) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2758985501)

**Citations:** 147 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [27](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Sarcasm on Twitter often cannot be recognized from the tweet text alone, because the reader needs context and some sense of the author's attitude. Ghosh and Veale examine three questions: whether a speaker's mood helps detection, how the conversational context can be added to a neural model, and how the model can keep pace with shifting public opinion. They estimate the author's current mood from the 50 tweets posted just before the target tweet, scored on the 11 AnalyzeWords/LIWC dimensions. For context, they use the tweet to which the target is a reply. The model combines CNN, LSTM and DNN components. Training labels come from a feedback scheme in which the authors of the tweets themselves confirm whether they were being sarcastic, rather than relying on outside annotators.

Adding either the author's mood or the context tweet gives similarly large gains over text alone, but using both together adds little beyond either one. Retraining each week during the 2016 US campaign further improved results. The released dataset, Sarcasm Magnet, pairs each tweet with its context and a snapshot of its author's psychological profile.

## Key points
- **Mood features:** Each author is profiled on 11 AnalyzeWords dimensions, scored 0–100, including Angry, Analytic, Upbeat and Arrogant. The profiles were analysed with KNN clustering (k=30) and Spearman correlations against sarcastic behaviour.
- **Sarcasm magnets:** In a set of 18K sarcastic tweets, the most frequent targets were @hillaryClinton, @realDonaldTrump, @bernieSanders, @AP and @megynKelly. Tweets aimed at @realDonaldTrump had the highest mean anger, yet 63% of their affective words were positive.
- **Model inputs:** Configurations combine the target tweet, with or without the addressee (TTIA/TTEA), the context tweet (CT) and the psychological dimensions (PD).
- **Incremental retraining:** In August 2016, four weekly batches of feedback-annotated tweets were added. On a fixed test set of 1,200 tweets (550 sarcastic, 650 non-sarcastic), F-score rose from 0.752 to 0.85.
- **Labelling approach:** Labels come directly from the authors, so the model learns what the writer intended rather than how an outside annotator interpreted the tweet.

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

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/shelves/linguistics/)

## Cited by

Cited by

27 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 12 of them have a page here, 15 not yet.

- [R^3: Reverse, Retrieve, and Rank for Sarcasm Generation with Commonsense Knowledge](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/chakrabarty-2020-r-textasciicircum3-reverse-retrieve-rank/)
- [Transformer-based Context-aware Sarcasm Detection in Conversation Threads from Social Media](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/dong-2020-transformer-based-context-aware-sarcasm/)
- [Linguistic Features in Automatic Sarcasm Detection](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ducret-2020-linguistic-features-automatic-sarcasm-detection/)
- [Sarcasm Analysis Using Conversation Context](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ghosh-2018-sarcasm-analysis-conversation-context/)
- [Interpreting Verbal Irony: Linguistic Strategies and the Connection to the Type of Semantic Incongruity](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ghosh-2020-interpreting-verbal-irony-linguistic-strategies/)
- [A Report on the 2020 Sarcasm Detection Shared Task](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ghosh-2020-report-2020-sarcasm-detection-shared/)
- [Generalizable Sarcasm Detection is Just Around the Corner, of Course!](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/jang-2024-generalizable-sarcasm-detection-is-just/)
- [Representing Social Media Users for Sarcasm Detection](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/kolchinski-2018-representing-social-media-users-sarcasm/)
- [Towards Multi-Modal Sarcasm Detection via Hierarchical Congruity Modeling with Knowledge Enhancement](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/liu-2022-multi-modal-sarcasm-detection-hierarchical/)
- [Reasoning with Sarcasm by Reading In-Between](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/tay-2018-reasoning-sarcasm-reading-between/)
- [Building a Bridge: A Method for Image-Text Sarcasm Detection Without Pretraining on Image-Text Data](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/wang-2020-building-bridge-method-image-text/)
- [Reasoning with Multimodal Sarcastic Tweets via Modeling Cross-Modality Contrast and Semantic Association](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/xu-2020-reasoning-multimodal-sarcastic-tweets-modeling/)

## Cite

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

```bibtex
@inproceedings{ghosh2017magnets,
  title = {{Magnets for Sarcasm: Making Sarcasm Detection Timely, Contextual and Very Personal}},
  author = {Ghosh, Aniruddha and Veale, Tony},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/d17-1050},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/d17-1050}
}
```

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