Irony in online reviews: A linguistic approach to identifying irony

Abstract

Several NLP-applications could benefit from identifying irony. Currently there is no process for doing so automatically. My findings suggest that irony occurs in up to 8.5% of online reviews. I identify three groups of irony based on the linguistic features they exhibit. I predict the irony in two of these groups are possible to identify automatically, covering 70% of the irony in my corpus. If my findings can be verified in a more exstensive investigation, I suspect my ideas can be applied to other domains than online reviews as well.