Stance-level Sarcasm Detection with BERT and Stance-centered Graph Attention Networks

Computational Linguistics (CL) associated with the Internet of Multimedia Things (IoMT)-enabled multimedia computing applications brings several research challenges, such as real-time speech understanding, deep fake video detection, emotion recognition, home automation, and so on. Due to the emergence of machine translation, CL solutions have increased tremendously for different natural language processing (NLP) applications. Nowadays, NLP-enabled IoMT is essential for its success. Sarcasm detection, a recently emerging artificial intelligence (AI) and NLP task, aims at discovering sarcastic, ironic, and metaphoric information implied in texts that are generated in the IoMT. It has drawn much attention from the AI and IoMT research community. The advance of sarcasm detection and NLP techniques will provide a cost-effective, intelligent way to work together with machine devices and high-level human-to-device interactions. However, existing sarcasm detection approaches neglect the hidden stance behind texts, thus insufficient to exploit the full potential of the task. Indeed, the stance, i.e., whether the author of a text is in favor of, against, or neutral toward the proposition or target talked in the text, largely determines the text’s actual sarcasm orientation. To fill the gap, in this research, we propose a new task: stance-level sarcasm detection (SLSD), where the goal is to uncover the author’s latent stance and based on it to identify the sarcasm polarity expressed in the text. We then propose an integral framework, which consists of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and a novel stance-centered graph attention networks (SCGAT). Specifically, BERT is used to capture the sentence representation, and SCGAT is designed to capture the stance information on specific target. Extensive experiments are conducted on a Chinese sarcasm sentiment dataset we created and the SemEval-2018 Task 3 English sarcasm dataset. The experimental results prove the effectiveness of the SCGAT framework over state-of-the-art baselines by a large margin.