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Comment by nebabyte | Hacker News Reader

To provide you refuge from the inevitable deluge of sarcastic comments in this comment section, here is a genuine/sincere comment: I like cats.

> sarcasm is labelled by the author

They literally just searched out "/s". Clever. Though I'm guessing the "independently verified" entailed reading a lot of those comments.

Did they also read through the nonlabelled comments to catch any unlabelled sarcasm? (Guessing not since the pitch is of "self labelled sarcasm") wonder if that'll trip any usage up.

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From the paper: "To investigate the noisiness of using Reddit as a source of self-annotated sarcasm we estimate the proportion of false positives and false negatives induced by our filtering. This is done by having three human evaluators manually check a random subset of 500 comments from SARC-main tagged as sarcastic and 500 tagged as non-sarcastic, with full access to the comment’s context. A comment was labeled a false positive if a majority determined that the “/s” tag was not an annotation but part of the sentence and a false negative if a majority determined that the comment author was clearly being sarcastic. After evaluation, the false positive rate was determined to be 2.0% and the false negative rate 3.0%. Although the false positive rate is reasonable, the false negative rate is significant compared to the sarcasm proportion, indicating large variation in the working definition of sarcasm and the need for methods that can handle noisy data in the unbalanced setting."

I've seen people add '/s' to their comment when what they wrote wasn't actually what I'd call sarcastic. Probably quite a few people have seen others use '/s' but they've inferred the wrong meaning of the label and then they use it incorrectly.

Seems from what was said above that this is something that has not been taken into account.

If it's indistinguishable to fellow humans as sarcasm then it doesn't matter for the purpose of this corpus.

What I mean is, it looks like the researchers only looked at whether or not the "/s" was intentionally placed at the end of the comment, not whether the comment was actually sarcastic or whether the person that wrote it understood that "/s" is meant to convey sarcasm.

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