"With 1 follower I must be AWESOME :P". Exploring the role of irony markers in irony recognition

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how irony markers like emoticons, emojis, and morphological cues help identify irony in social media conversations on Twitter and Reddit.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of irony markers across two social media platforms, highlighting platform-specific cues for irony recognition.

Findings

Emoticons and emojis are key irony markers on Twitter.

Morphological markers like interjections are prominent on Reddit.

Different social media platforms use distinct irony cues.

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 show 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.