Skip to main content

A Novel Approach for Supporting Italian Satire Detection Through Deep Learning

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Flexible Query Answering Systems (FQAS 2021)

Abstract

Satire is a way of criticizing people (or ideas) by ridiculing them on political, social, and morals topics often used to denounce political and societal problems, leveraging comedic devices such as parody exaggeration, incongruity, etc.etera. Detecting satire is one of the most challenging computational linguistics tasks, natural language processing, and social multimedia sentiment analysis. In particular, as satirical texts include figurative communication for expressing ideas/opinions concerning people, sentiment analysis systems may be negatively affected; therefore, satire should be adequately addressed to avoid such systems’ performance degradation. This paper tackles automatic satire detection through effective deep learning (DL) architecture that has been shown to be useful for addressing sarcasm/irony detection problems. We both trained and tested the system exploiting articles derived from two important satiric blogs, Lercio and IlFattoQuotidaino, and significant Italian newspapers. Experiments show an optimal performance achieved by the network capable of detecting satire in a context where it is not marked.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 64.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    www.nltk.org.

  2. 2.

    www.lercio.it.

  3. 3.

    www.ilfattoquotidaino.it.

  4. 4.

    https://eventregistry.org/.

References

  1. Alcamo, T., Cuzzocrea, A., Lo Bosco, G., Pilato, G., Schicchi, D.: Analysis and comparison of deep learning networks for supporting sentiment mining in text corpora. In: 22th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications and Services (iiWAS2020) (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Barbieri, F., Ronzano, F., Saggion, H.: Do we criticise (and laugh) in the same way? Automatic detection of multi-lingual satirical news in Twitter. In: Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Barbieri, F., Saggion, H.: Automatic detection of irony and humour in Twitter. In: ICCC, pp. 155–162 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Bengio, Y., Simard, P., Frasconi, P.: Learning long-term dependencies with gradient descent is difficult. IEEE Trans. Neural Netw. 5(2), 157–166 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1109/72.279181

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Bojanowski, P., Grave, E., Joulin, A., Mikolov, T.: Enriching word vectors with subword information. CoRR abs/1607.04606 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Burfoot, C., Baldwin, T.: Automatic satire detection: Are you having a laugh? In: Proceedings of the ACL-IJCNLP 2009 Conference Short Papers, pp. 161–164 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Campan, A., Cuzzocrea, A., Truta, T.M.: Fighting fake news spread in online social networks: actual trends and future research directions. In: 2017 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, BigData 2017, Boston, MA, USA, 11–14 December 2017, pp. 4453–4457. IEEE Computer Society (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Casalino, G., Castellano, G., Mencar, C.: Incremental adaptive semi-supervised fuzzy clustering for data stream classification. In: 2018 IEEE Conference on Evolving and Adaptive Intelligent Systems (EAIS), pp. 1–7 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1109/EAIS.2018.8397172

  9. Casalino, G., Castiello, C., Del Buono, N., Mencar, C.: A framework for intelligent twitter data analysis with non-negative matrix factorization. Int. J. Web Inform. Syst. 14(3), 334–356 (2018)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Cuzzocrea, A., Song, I.: Big graph analytics: the state of the art and future research agenda. In: Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Data Warehousing and OLAP, DOLAP 2014, Shanghai, China, 3–7 November 2014, pp. 99–101. ACM (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Di Gangi, M.A., Lo Bosco, G., Pilato, G.: Effectiveness of data-driven induction of semantic spaces and traditional classifiers for sarcasm detection. Nat. Lang. Eng. 25(2), 257–285 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1017/S1351324919000019

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Grave, E., Bojanowski, P., Gupta, P., Joulin, A., Mikolov, T.: Learning word vectors for 157 languages. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018) (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Highet, G.: Anatomy of Satire. Princeton University Press, Princeton (2015)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  14. Hoang Son, L., Kumar, A., Raj Saurabh, S., Arora, A., Nayyar, A., Abdel-Basset, M.: Sarcasm detection using soft attention-based bidirectional long short-term memory model with convolution network. IEEE Access 7, 23319–23328 (2019)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Hochreiter, S., Schmidhuber, J.: Long short-term memory. Neural Comput. 9(8), 1735–1780 (1997)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Hodgart, M.J.C.: Die Satire, vol. 42. Transaction Publishers (1969)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Picard, R.W.: Affective Computing. MIT Press, Cambridge (2000)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  18. Pollard, A.: Satire, vol. 6. Taylor & Francis (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Rose, S., Engel, D., Cramer, N., Cowley, W.: Automatic keyword extraction from individual documents. Text Min.: Appl. Theory 1, 1–20 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Schicchi, D., Lo Bosco, G., Pilato, G.: Machine learning models for measuring syntax complexity of English text. In: Samsonovich, A.V. (ed.) BICA 2019. AISC, vol. 948, pp. 449–454. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25719-4_59

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  21. Schicchi, D., Pilato, G.: WORDY: a semi-automatic methodology aimed at the creation of neologisms based on a semantic network and blending devices. In: Barolli, L., Terzo, O. (eds.) CISIS 2017. AISC, vol. 611, pp. 236–248. Springer, Cham (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61566-0_23

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgement

Gabriella Casalino acknowledges funding from the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research through the European PON project AIM (Attraction and International Mobility), nr. 1852414, activity 2, line 1.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alfredo Cuzzocrea .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Casalino, G., Cuzzocrea, A., Bosco, G.L., Maiorana, M., Pilato, G., Schicchi, D. (2021). A Novel Approach for Supporting Italian Satire Detection Through Deep Learning. In: Andreasen, T., De Tré, G., Kacprzyk, J., Legind Larsen, H., Bordogna, G., Zadrożny, S. (eds) Flexible Query Answering Systems. FQAS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12871. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86967-0_13

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86967-0_13

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-86966-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-86967-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics