This paper presents our strategy to tackle the EACL WANLP-2021 Shared Task 2: Sarcasm and Sentiment Detection. One of the subtasks aims at developing a system that identifies whether a given Arabic tweet is sarcastic in nature or not, while the other
aims to identify the sentiment of the Arabic tweet. We approach the task in two steps. The first step involves pre processing the provided dataset by performing insertions, deletions and segmentation operations on various parts of the text. The second step involves experimenting with multiple variants of two transformer based models, AraELECTRA and AraBERT. Our final approach was ranked seventh and fourth in the Sarcasm and Sentiment Detection subtasks respectively.
Sarcasm is one of the main challenges for sentiment analysis systems due to using implicit indirect phrasing for expressing opinions, especially in Arabic. This paper presents the system we submitted to the Sarcasm and Sentiment Detection task of WAN
LP-2021 that is capable of dealing with both two subtasks. We first perform fine-tuning on two kinds of pre-trained language models (PLMs) with different training strategies. Then an effective stacking mechanism is applied on top of the fine-tuned PLMs to obtain the final prediction. Experimental results on ArSarcasm-v2 dataset show the effectiveness of our method and we rank third and second for subtask 1 and 2.
