Ridiculously Expensive Watches and Surprisingly Many Reviewers: A Study of Irony

Irony is something most people can tell is therewhen they see it, but it is not so easy to define, let alone detectautomatically. In this paper we describe the construction of abalanced corpus of ironic vs. serious watch reviews and show thepromising results achieved by classifiers trained on this corpusin predicting the presence of irony or lack thereof in productreviews from a manually labeled corpus. We try to find commonfeatures in the two corpora and outline our next steps towardsa model which would detect ironic utterances in more general contexts.