# The Role of Conversation Context for Sarcasm Detection in Online Interactions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.06226 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06226/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Multi-modal Sarcasm Detection and Humor Classification in Code-mixed Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09984/) (2021)
- [When did you become so smart, oh wise one?! Sarcasm Explanation in Multi-modal Multi-party Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06419/) (2022)
- [Multi-source Semantic Graph-based Multimodal Sarcasm Explanation Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16650/) (2023)
- [Explaining (Sarcastic) Utterances to Enhance Affect Understanding in Multimodal Dialogues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11049/) (2022)
- ["Laughing at you or with you": The Role of Sarcasm in Shaping the Disagreement Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10952/) (2021)
- [ConFiguRe: Exploring Discourse-level Chinese Figures of Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07678/) (2022)
- [Computational Sarcasm Analysis on Social Media: A Systematic Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06170/) (2022)
- [KoCoSa: Korean Context-aware Sarcasm Detection Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14428/) (2024)
- [How to Describe Images in a More Funny Way? Towards a Modular Approach to Cross-Modal Sarcasm Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10992/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Quantum-Cognitively Inspired Sentiment Analysis Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03608/) (2023)
- [Dual Modality-Aware Gated Prompt Tuning for Few-Shot Multimodal Sarcasm Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04468/) (2025)
- [A Similarity Measure for Comparing Conversational Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.18956/) (2025)
- [EMBRACE: Shaping Inclusive Opinion Representation by Aligning Implicit Conversations with Social Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20264/) (2025)
- [RAM-SD: Retrieval-Augmented Multi-agent framework for Sarcasm Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17002/) (2026)
- [Nek Minit: Harnessing Pragmatic Metacognitive Prompting for Explainable Sarcasm Detection of Australian and Indian English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15095/) (2025)
- [PC-MNet: Dual-Level Congruity Modeling for Multimodal Sarcasm Detection via Polarity-Modulated Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02447/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Computational models for sarcasm detection have often relied on the content of utterances in isolation. However, speaker's sarcastic intent is not always obvious without additional context. Focusing on social media discussions, we investigate two issues: (1) does modeling of conversation context help in sarcasm detection and (2) can we understand what part of conversation context triggered the sarcastic reply. To address the first issue, we investigate several types of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks that can model both the conversation context and the sarcastic response. We show that the conditional LSTM network (Rocktaschel et al., 2015) and LSTM networks with sentence level attention on context and response outperform the LSTM model that reads only the response. To address the second issue, we present a qualitative analysis of attention weights produced by the LSTM models with attention and discuss the results compared with human performance on the task.