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International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence

ICCCI 2016: Computational Collective Intelligence pp 68–77Cite as

Detecting Satire in Italian Political Commentaries

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9876))

Abstract

This paper presents computational work to detect satire/sarcasm in long commentaries on Italian politics. It uses the lexica extracted from the manual annotation based on Appraisal Theory, of some 30 K word texts. The underlying hypothesis is that using this framework it is possible to precisely pinpoint ironic content through the deep semantic analysis of evaluative judgement and appreciation. The paper presents the manual annotation phase realized on 112 texts by two well-known Italian journalists. After a first experimentation phase based on the lexica extracted from the xml output files, we proceeded to retag lexical entries dividing them up into two subclasses: figurative and literal meaning. Finally more fine-grained Appraisal features have been derived and more experiments have been carried out and compared to results obtained by a lean sentiment analysis. The final output is produced from held out texts to verify the usefulness of the lexica and the Appraisal theory in detecting ironic content.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Permission to republish excerpts from their articles has been granted personally by the authors.

  2. 2.

    As reported in M&W p. 52.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Language Studies and Department of Computer Science, Ca’ Bembo 1075 – Ca’ Foscari University, 30123, Venezia, Italy

    Rodolfo Delmonte & Michele Stingo

Authors
  1. Rodolfo Delmonte
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  2. Michele Stingo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rodolfo Delmonte .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Wroclaw University of Technology , Wroclaw, Poland

    Ngoc Thanh Nguyen

  2. Aristotle University of Thessaloniki , Thessaloniki, Greece

    Lazaros Iliadis

  3. Department of Forestry and Manageme, Democritus University of Thrace Department of Forestry and Manageme, Orestiada Thrace, Greece

    Yannis Manolopoulos

  4. Wrocław University of Technology , Wrocław, Poland

    Bogdan Trawiński

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Delmonte, R., Stingo, M. (2016). Detecting Satire in Italian Political Commentaries. In: Nguyen, N., Iliadis, L., Manolopoulos, Y., Trawiński, B. (eds) Computational Collective Intelligence. ICCCI 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9876. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45246-3_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45246-3_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-45245-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-45246-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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