Explainable artificial intelligence for sarcasm detection in dialogues

Kumar, A ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4263-7168, Dikshit, S and Albuquerque, VHC (2021) Explainable artificial intelligence for sarcasm detection in dialogues. Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, 2021. p. 2939334. ISSN 1530-8669

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Abstract

Sarcasm detection in dialogues has been gaining popularity among natural language processing (NLP) researchers with the increased use of conversational threads on social media. Capturing the knowledge of the domain of discourse, context propagation during the course of dialogue, and situational context and tone of the speaker are some important features to train the machine learning models for detecting sarcasm in real time. As situational comedies vibrantly represent human mannerism and behaviour in everyday real-life situations, this research demonstrates the use of an ensemble supervised learning algorithm to detect sarcasm in the benchmark dialogue dataset, MUStARD. The punch-line utterance and its associated context are taken as features to train the eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) method. The primary goal is to predict sarcasm in each utterance of the speaker using the chronological nature of a scene. Further, it is vital to prevent model bias and help decision makers understand how to use the models in the right way. Therefore, as a twin goal of this research, we make the learning model used for conversational sarcasm detection interpretable. This is done using two post hoc interpretability approaches, Local Interpretable Model-agnostic Explanations (LIME) and Shapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP), to generate explanations for the output of a trained classifier. The classification results clearly depict the importance of capturing the intersentence context to detect sarcasm in conversational threads. The interpretability methods show the words (features) that influence the decision of the model the most and help the user understand how the model is making the decision for detecting sarcasm in dialogues.