Contextualized Satire Detection in Short Texts Using Deep Learning Techniques

Satire is prominent in user-generated content on various online platforms in the form of satirical news, customer reviews, blogs, articles, and short messages that are typically of an informal nature. As satire is also used to disseminate false information on the Internet, its computational detection has become a well-known issue. Existing work focuses primarily on formal document- or sentence-level textual data, whereas informal short texts have gotten less attention for satire detection. This paper presents a new model called BiLSTM self-attention (BiSAT) for detecting satire in informal short texts. It consists of various components such as input, embedding, self-attention, and two bi-directional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) layers for learning crucial contextual information pertaining to the satire present in the texts. The input layer uses the text as input to create an input vector, which is then given to the embedding layer to create the appropriate numeric vector. The output of the embedding layer is passed on to the first BiLSTM layer, which extracts contextual information-based sequences in the opposite direction. Between the first and second BiLSTM layers, a self-attention layer is employed to draw attention to the important satirical information that is acquired by the hidden layer of the first BiLSTM. The BiSAT model also takes a classic feature engineering approach, employing a 13-dimensional auxiliary feature vector comprised of features from four separate feature categories: sentiment, punctuation, hyperbole, and affective. The proposed BiSAT model is empirically evaluated on two benchmark datasets and a newly created dataset called Satire-280. It outperforms existing research and baseline methods by a significant margin. The Satire-280 dataset along with code can be downloaded from GitHub repository: https://github.com/Ashraf-Kamal/Satire-Detection.