News-Headlines-Dataset-For-Sarcasm-Detection

Past studies in Sarcasm Detection mostly make use of Twitter datasets collected using hashtag based supervision but such datasets are noisy in terms of labels and language. Furthermore, many tweets are replies to other tweets and detecting sarcasm in these requires the availability of contextual tweets.

To overcome the limitations related to noise in Twitter datasets, this Headlines dataset for Sarcasm Detection is collected from two news website. TheOnion aims at producing sarcastic versions of current events and we collected all the headlines from News in Brief and News in Photos categories (which are sarcastic). We collect real (and non-sarcastic) news headlines from HuffPost.

This new dataset has following advantages over the existing Twitter datasets:

• Since news headlines are written by professionals in a formal manner, there are no spelling mistakes and informal usage. This reduces the sparsity and also increases the chance of finding pre-trained embeddings.
• Furthermore, since the sole purpose of TheOnion is to publish sarcastic news, we get high-quality labels with much less noise as compared to Twitter datasets.
• Unlike tweets which are replies to other tweets, the news headlines we obtained are self-contained. This would help us in teasing apart the real sarcastic elements.

Data

Each record consists of three attributes:

• is_sarcastic: 1 if the record is sarcastic otherwise 0

• headline: the headline of the news article

• article_link: link to the original news article. Useful in collecting supplementary data

Reading the data

In python, data can be read using the following function:

def parseJson(fname):
    for line in open(fname, 'r'):
        yield eval(line)

Example usecase: data = list(parseJson('./Sarcasm_Headlines_Dataset.json'))

Statistics

The general statistics of this dataset along with high-quality Twitter dataset (in terms of label only) provided by Semeval challenge are given in the following table.

Statistic/Dataset	Headlines	Semeval
# Records	28,619	3,000
# Sarcastic records	13,635	2,396
# Non-sarcastic records	14,984	604
% of pre-trained word embeddings not available	23.35	35.53

We can notice that for Headlines dataset, where the text is much more formal in language, the percentage of words not available in word2vec vocabulary is much less than Semeval dataset.

WordClouds

As a basic exploration, following figures visualize the word clouds through which we can see the types of words that occur frequently in each category.

Sarcastic Headlines

Non-sarcastic Headlines

Acknowledgements

This dataset was collected from TheOnion and HuffPost.

Cite

Please cite the following articles in suitable format if you use the dataset:

Text Format:

1. Misra, Rishabh and Prahal Arora. "Sarcasm Detection using News Headlines Dataset." AI Open (2023).
2. Misra, Rishabh and Jigyasa Grover. "Sculpting Data for ML: The first act of Machine Learning." ISBN 978-0-578-83125-1 (2021).

BibTex Format:

@article{misra2023Sarcasm,
  title = {Sarcasm Detection using News Headlines Dataset},
  journal = {AI Open},
  volume = {4},
  pages = {13-18},
  year = {2023},
  issn = {2666-6510},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aiopen.2023.01.001},
  url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666651023000013},
  author = {Rishabh Misra and Prahal Arora},
}

@book{misra2021sculpting,
author = {Misra, Rishabh and Grover, Jigyasa},
year = {2021},
month = {01},
pages = {},
title = {Sculpting Data for ML: The first act of Machine Learning},
isbn = {978-0-578-83125-1}
}