"With 1 Follower I Must Be AWESOME :P." Exploring the Role of Irony Markers in Irony Recognition

Abstract

Conversations in social media often contain the use of irony or sarcasm, when the users say the opposite of what they really mean. Irony markers are the meta-communicative clues that inform the reader that an utterance is ironic. We propose a thorough analysis of theoretically grounded irony markers in two social media platforms: Twitter and Reddit. Classification and frequency analysis shows that for Twitter, typographic markers such as emoticons and emojis are the most discriminative markers to recognize ironic utterances, while for Reddit the morphological markers (e.g., interjections, tag questions) are the most discriminative.