BERT’s The Word : Sarcasm Target Detection using BERT

In 2019, the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA) organised a shared task to detect the target of sarcastic comments posted on social media. However, there were no winners as it proved to be a difficult task. In this work, we revisit the task posted by ALTA by using transformers, specifically BERT, given the current success of the transformer-based model in various NLP tasks. We conducted our experiments on two BERT models (TD-BERT and BERT-AEN). We evaluated our model on the data set provided by ALTA (Reddit) and two additional data sets: ‘book snippets’ and ‘Tweets’. Our results show that our proposed method achieves a 15.2 % improvement from the current state-of-the-art system on the Reddit data set and 4 % improvement on Tweets.