Should a Chatbot be Sarcastic? Understanding User Preferences Towards Sarcasm Generation

Previous sarcasm generation research has focused on how to generate text that people perceive as sarcastic to create more human-like interactions. In this paper, we argue that we should first turn our attention to the question of when sarcasm should be generated, finding that humans consider sarcastic responses inappropriate to many input utterances. Next, we use a theory-driven framework for generating sarcastic responses, which allows us to control the linguistic devices included during generation. For each device, we investigate how much humans associate it with sarcasm, finding that pragmatic insincerity and emotional markers are devices crucial for making sarcasm recognisable.