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Tackling Irony Detection using Ensemble Classifiers

Automatic approaches to irony detection have been of interest to the NLP community for a long time, yet, state-of-the-art approaches still fall way short of what one would consider a desirable performance. In part this is due to the inherent difficulty of the problem. However, in recent years ensembles of transformer-based approaches have emerged as a promising direction to push the state of the art forward in a wide range of NLP applications. A different, more recent, development is the automatic augmentation of training data. In this paper we will explore both these directions for the task of irony detection in social media. Using the common SemEval 2018 Task 3 benchmark collection we demonstrate that transformer models are well suited in ensemble classifiers for the task at hand. In the multi-class classification task we observe statistically significant improvements over strong baselines. For binary classification we achieve performance that is on par with state-of-the-art alternatives. The examined data augmentation strategies showed an effect, but are not decisive for good results.