Sarcasm detection is important for several NLP tasks such as sentiment identification in product reviews, user feedback, and online forums. It is a challenging task requiring a deep understanding of language, context, and world knowledge. In this pap
er, we investigate whether incorporating commonsense knowledge helps in sarcasm detection. For this, we incorporate commonsense knowledge into the prediction process using a graph convolution network with pre-trained language model embeddings as input. Our experiments with three sarcasm detection datasets indicate that the approach does not outperform the baseline model. We perform an exhaustive set of experiments to analyze where commonsense support adds value and where it hurts classification. Our implementation is publicly available at: https://github.com/brcsomnath/commonsense-sarcasm.
Mikolov et al. (2013a) observed that continuous bag-of-words (CBOW) word embeddings tend to underperform Skip-gram (SG) embeddings, and this finding has been reported in subsequent works. We find that these observations are driven not by fundamental
differences in their training objectives, but more likely on faulty negative sampling CBOW implementations in popular libraries such as the official implementation, word2vec.c, and Gensim. We show that after correcting a bug in the CBOW gradient update, one can learn CBOW word embeddings that are fully competitive with SG on various intrinsic and extrinsic tasks, while being many times faster to train.
