German Irony Detection Model 🇩🇪

Overview

This model detects irony in German text using a fine-tuned BERT architecture. It builds upon the German sentiment analysis work by Guhr et al. (2020) and incorporates tuning procedures from Lüdke et al. (2021).

Model Description

Task: Binary classification (ironic vs. non-ironic)
Language: German
Base Model: BERT
Training Data: Combined dataset from Schmidt & Harbusch (2023) and Claude by Anthropic (2025)
Training Infrastructure: CPU-based training

Performance Metrics

Cross-Validation Results (5-fold)

Metric	Mean	Std Dev
Accuracy	0.9651	0.0154
Precision	0.9731	0.0117
Recall	0.9632	0.0198
F1-Score	0.9681	0.0141

Hold-out Test Set Performance

Class	Precision	Recall	F1-Score
Not Ironic	0.8000	0.9600	0.8727
Ironic	0.9500	0.7600	0.8444

Usage

from transformers import AutoModelForSequenceClassification, AutoTokenizer

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("username/german-irony-detector")
model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained("username/german-irony-detector")

def predict(text):
    inputs = tokenizer(text, return_tensors="pt", truncation=True, max_length=512)
    outputs = model(**inputs)
    probabilities = outputs.logits.softmax(dim=-1)
    return probabilities

Limitations

Optimized for German social media text
May not capture very subtle forms of irony
Performance may vary with regional German dialects
Limited to text-based irony detection

Training Data

The model was trained on:

Schmidt & Harbusch (2023) dataset:
- Training set: 200 texts
- Test set: 100 texts
Synthetic data generated by Claude (Anthropic, 2025)

Future Development

Train on larger datasets
Add positive/negative irony classification

More Information

For detailed documentation, additional resources, and the full research context, please visit my GitHub repository: https://github.com/JacobSKN/german-irony-detector

Citations

@misc{guhr2020german,
    title={German Sentiment Analysis},
    author={Guhr, Oliver and et al.},
    year={2020},
    howpublished={\url{https://github.com/oliverguhr/german-sentiment-lib}}
}

@misc{schmidt2023german,
    title={German Irony Dataset},
    author={Schmidt and Harbusch},
    year={2023}
}

Author

Jacob Schildknecht (jacob.schildknecht@zew.de)

Contact

For questions or feedback about this model, please contact: jacob.schildknecht@zew.de