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Sarcasm identification in textual data: systematic review, research challenges and open directions

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Abstract

Sarcasm is a form of sentiment whereby people express the implicit information, usually the opposite of the message content in order to hurt someone emotionally or criticise something in a humorous way. Sarcasm identification in textual data, being one of the hardest challenges in natural language processing (NLP), has recently become an interesting research area due to its importance in improving the sentiment analysis of social media data. A few studies have carried out a comprehensive literature review on sarcasm identification in the existing primary study within the last 11 years. Thus, this study carried out a review on the classification techniques for sarcasm identification under the aspects of datasets, pre-processing, feature engineering, classification algorithms, and performance metrics. The study has considered the published article from the period of 2008 to 2019. Forty (40) academic literature were selected from the 7 standard academic databases in order to carry out the review and realize the objectives. The study revealed that most researchers created their own datasets since there is no standard available datasets in the domain of sarcasm identification. Context and content-based linguistic features were used in most of the studies. This review shows that n-gram and parts of speech tagging techniques were the most commonly used feature extraction techniques. However, binary representation and term frequency were utilized for feature representation whereas Chi squared and information gain were used for the feature selection scheme. Moreover, classification algorithm such as support vector machine, Naïve Bayes, random forest, maximum entropy, and decision tree algorithm were mostly applied using accuracy, precision, recall and F-measure for performance measures. Finally, research challenges and future direction are summarized in this review. This review reveals the impact of sarcasm identification in building effective product reviews and would serve as handle resources for researchers and practitioners in sarcasm identification and text classification in general.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya, 50603, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

    Christopher Ifeanyi Eke, Azah Anir Norman,  Liyana Shuib & Henry Friday Nweke

  2. Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, Federal University, P.M.B 146, Lafia, Nasarawa State, Nigeria

    Christopher Ifeanyi Eke

  3. Computer Science Department, Ebonyi State University, P.M.B 053, Abakaliki, Ebonyi State, Nigeria

    Henry Friday Nweke

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Appendix: The following abbreviations and their full form were used in this paper

Appendix: The following abbreviations and their full form were used in this paper

Abbreviations

Definitions

Abbreviations

Definitions

AB

Adaboost

ME

Maximum entropy

ACC

Accuracy

MI

Mutual information

ANN

Artificial neural networks

NB

Naïve Bayes

API

Application protocol interface

NLP

Natural language processing

AUC

Area under the curve

POS

Part of speech tagging

BoW

Bag of words

PRE

Precision

BR

Binary representation

RB

Rule base

CNN

Convolutional neural network

REC

Recall

BW

Balanced winnow

RF

Random forest

CUE-CNN

Convolutional user embedding convolutional neural network

RNN

Recurrent neural network

DNN

Deep neural network

SLR

Systematic literature review

DT

Decision tree

SMO

Sequential minimal optimization

FC

Fuzzy clustering

SVM

Support vector machine

F-M

F-measure

TF

Term frequency

FN

False negative

TFIDF

Term frequency with inverse document frequency

FP

False positive

TN

True negative

IG

Information gain

TP

True positive

KS

Kappa statistics

TPR

True positive rate

k-NN

k-nearest neighbours

URL

Universal resource locator

LSTM

Long short term memory

VSF

Visual semantic feature

LR

Logistic regression

  

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Eke, C.I., Norman, A.A., Liyana Shuib et al. Sarcasm identification in textual data: systematic review, research challenges and open directions. Artif Intell Rev 53, 4215–4258 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-019-09791-8

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