Annotating Shakespeare’s Sonnets with Appraisal Theory to Detect Irony
Authors: Nicolò Busetto, Rodolfo Delmonte (Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, 2019)
Topic: Sentiment, Emotion, Irony, Hate

Abstract
In this paper, we propose an approach to irony detection based on Appraisal Theory (Martin and White, 2005) in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, a well-known dataset that is statistically valuable. In order to produce meaningful experiments, we created a gold standard by collecting opinions from famous literary critics on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, focusing on irony. We started by manually annotating the data using Appraisal Theory as a reference framework. This choice is motivated by the fact that Appraisal annotation schemes allow smooth evaluation of highly elaborated texts, such as political commentaries. The annotation is then automatically compiled and checked against the gold standard in order to verify the persistence of certain schemes that can be identified as ironic, satiric, or sarcastic. Upon observation, irony detection reaches a final match of 80%.

Introduction
Shakespeare’s Sonnets are a collection of 154 poems renowned for being full of ironic content (Weiser, 1983; Weiser, 1987) and for their ambiguity, which often reverses the overall interpretation of the sonnet. Lexical ambiguity, i.e., a word with several meanings, emanates from the way in which the author uses words that can be interpreted in multiple ways, not only because they are inherently polysemous but also because sometimes the additional meaning they evoke can be derived based on their sound, i.e., homophones (see "eye," "I" in sonnet 152). The sonnets are also full of metaphors, which often require contextualizing the content within the historical Elizabethan life and society. Furthermore, there is an abundance of words related to specific language domains in the sonnets. For instance, there are words related to the language of economy, war, nature, and the discoveries of the modern age, each of which can be used as a metaphor for love. Many of the sonnets are organized around a conceptual contrast, an opposition that runs parallel and then diverges, sometimes using the rhetorical figure of chiasmus. It is this contrast that generates irony, and sometimes satire, sarcasm, and even parody. Irony can be considered as what one means using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect, or as a state of affairs or an event that seems contrary to what one expects and is amusing as a result. Sarcasm, on the other hand, can be regarded as the use of irony to mock or convey contempt. Parody is achieved by using the words or thoughts of a person but adapting them to a ridiculously inappropriate subject. There are several types of irony, but in this study, we focus on verbal irony, which, in the strict sense, involves saying the opposite of what you mean, with the outcome depending on the extralinguistic context (Attardo, 1994). As a result, satire and irony are slightly overlapping but constitute two separate techniques, and sarcasm can be regarded as a specialization or a subset of irony. It is important to note that in many cases, these linguistic structures require the use of nonliteral or figurative language, such as metaphors. This consideration has been carefully taken into account when annotating the sonnets using the Appraisal Theory Framework (henceforth ATF). In our approach, we will follow the incongruity presumption, or incongruity-resolution presumption. Theories connected to the incongruity presumption are mostly cognitive-based and related to concepts discussed, for example, in Attardo (2000). The focus of theorization under this presumption is that in humorous texts, or broadly speaking in any humorous situation, there is an opposition between two alternative dimensions. As a result, we will look for contrast in our study of the sonnets, produced by the contents of manual classification. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate how ATF can be useful for detecting irony, considering its ambiguity and elusive traits.

Conclusion
In this paper we have presented work carried out to annotate and experiment with the theme of irony in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The gold standard for the experiment has been created by collecting comments produced by literary critics on the presence of some kind of thematic, semantic and syntactic opposition in the sonnets as to produce some sort of irony. At first the sonnets have been annotated using the framework of Appraisal Theory and then we checked the results: we obtained a very high level of matching with the critics’ opinions at 80%. Eventually, Appraisal framework has shown its ability to classify and diversify different levels of irony effectively.