R3: Reverse, Retrieve, and Rank for Sarcasm Generation with Commonsense Knowledge

We propose an unsupervised approach for sarcasm generation based on a non-sarcastic input sentence. Our method employs a retrieve-andedit framework to instantiate two major characteristics of sarcasm: reversal of valence and semantic incongruity with the context, which could include shared commonsense or world knowledge between the speaker and the listener. While prior works on sarcasm generation predominantly focus on context incongruity, we show that combining valence reversal and semantic incongruity based on commonsense knowledge generates sarcastic messages of higher quality based on several criteria. Human evaluation shows that our system generates sarcasm better than human judges 34% of the time, and better than a reinforced hybrid baseline 90% of the time. * The research was conducted when the author was at USC/ISI.