"My life is miserable, have to sign 500 autographs everyday": Exposing Humblebragging, the Brags in Disguise

Humblebragging is a phenomenon in which individuals present self-promotional statements under the guise of modesty or complaints. For example, a statement like, "Ugh, I can't believe I got promoted to lead the entire team. So stressful!", subtly highlights an achievement while pretending to be complaining. Detecting humblebragging is important for machines to better understand the nuances of human language, especially in tasks like sentiment analysis and intent recognition. However, this topic has not yet been studied in computational linguistics. For the first time, we introduce the task of automatically detecting humblebragging in text. We formalize the task by proposing a 4-tuple definition of humblebragging and evaluate machine learning, deep learning, and large language models (LLMs) on this task, comparing their performance with humans. We also create and release a dataset called HB-24, containing 3,340 humblebrags generated using GPT-4o. Our experiments show that detecting humblebragging is non-trivial, even for humans. Our best model achieves an F1-score of 0.88. This work lays the foundation for further exploration of this nuanced linguistic phenomenon and its integration into broader natural language understanding systems. * Equal contribution. 1 Image source: https://www.simplypsychology.org/ maslow.html remains unexplored through the lens of computational linguistics. Evidence from search trends, social media behavior, and historical usage suggests that humblebragging is a persistent and recognizable phenomenon, even when not explicitly labeled. We provide supporting statistics and examples in Appendix A. Humblebragging is closely related to other forms of figurative language, such as sarcasm (Gibbs, 1986) and irony (Garmendia, 2018), which also rely on verbal incongruity, a contrast between what is said and what is meant. While irony typically contrasts expectation with reality and sarcasm adds a mocking tone, humblebragging uniquely conceals self-promotion within a modest or complaining remark. A detailed comparison of these differences is provided in Appendix B. Although extensive research exists on computational modeling of sar-