Exploring the Impact of Pragmatic Phenomena on Irony Detection in Tweets: A Multilingual Corpus Study

This paper provides a linguistic and pragmatic analysis of the phenomenon of irony in order to represent how Twitter’s users exploit irony devices within their communication strategies for generating textual contents. We aim to measure the impact of a wide-range of pragmatic phenomena in the interpretation of irony, and to investigate how these phenomena interact with contexts local to the tweet. Informed by linguistic theories, we propose for the first time a multi-layered annotation schema for irony and its application to a corpus of French, English and Italian tweets. We detail each layer, explore their interactions, and discuss our results according to a qualitative and quantitative perspective.