Human and System Perspectives on the Expression of Irony: An Analysis of Likelihood Labels and Rationales

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the recognition of irony by both humans and automatic systems. We achieve this by enhancing the annotations of an English benchmark data set for irony detection. This enhancement involves a layer of human-annotated irony likelihood using a 7-point Likert scale that combines binary annotation with a confidence measure. Additionally, the annotators indicated the trigger words that led them to perceive the text as ironic, which leveraged necessary theoretical insights into the definition of irony and its various forms. By comparing these trigger word spans across annotators, we determine the extent to which humans agree on the source of irony in a text. Finally, we compare the human-annotated spans with sub-token importance attributions for fine-tuned transformers using Layer Integrated Gradients, a state-of-the-art interpretability metric. Our results indicate that our model achieves better performance on tweets that were annotated with high confidence and high agreement. Although automatic systems can identify trigger words with relative success, they still attribute a significant amount of their importance to the wrong tokens.

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