Towards a Contextual Pragmatic Model to Detect Irony in Tweets

This paper proposes an approach to capture the pragmatic context needed to infer irony in tweets. We aim to test the validity of two main hypotheses: (1) the presence of negations, as an internal propriety of an utterance, can help to detect the disparity between the literal and the intended meaning of an utterance, (2) a tweet containing an asserted fact of the form Not(P1) is ironic if and only if one can assess the absurdity of P1. Our first results are encouraging and show that deriving a pragmatic contextual model is feasible.