Are you serious?: Rhetorical Questions and Sarcasm in Social Media Dialog

TL;DR

This paper develops a dataset and models to identify rhetorical questions and their sarcastic or non-sarcastic use in social media, enhancing understanding of figurative language in online discourse.

Contribution

It introduces a large annotated corpus of rhetorical questions from social media and debate forums, and demonstrates effective models for classifying their pragmatic and sarcastic functions.

Findings

High accuracy in distinguishing RQs from sincere questions (up to 0.76 F1).

Effective classification of sarcastic vs. non-sarcastic RQs with models reaching 0.83 F1.

Linguistic features and context are key to understanding RQ functions.

Abstract

Effective models of social dialog must understand a broad range of rhetorical and figurative devices. Rhetorical questions (RQs) are a type of figurative language whose aim is to achieve a pragmatic goal, such as structuring an argument, being persuasive, emphasizing a point, or being ironic. While there are computational models for other forms of figurative language, rhetorical questions have received little attention to date. We expand a small dataset from previous work, presenting a corpus of 10,270 RQs from debate forums and Twitter that represent different discourse functions. We show that we can clearly distinguish between RQs and sincere questions (0.76 F1). We then show that RQs can be used both sarcastically and non-sarcastically, observing that non-sarcastic (other) uses of RQs are frequently argumentative in forums, and persuasive in tweets. We present experiments to distinguish between these uses of RQs using SVM and LSTM models that represent linguistic features and post-level context, achieving results as high as 0.76 F1 for "sarcastic" and 0.77 F1 for "other" in forums, and 0.83 F1 for both "sarcastic" and "other" in tweets. We supplement our quantitative experiments with an in-depth characterization of the linguistic variation in RQs.