Shared task on Sarcasm and Sentiment Detection In Arabic

Sarcasm detection is the process of identifying whether a piece of text is sarcastic or not. Sarcasm is one of the main challenges for sentiment analysis systems. The reason for this is that a sarcastic sentence usually carries a negative implicit sentiment, while it is expressed using positive expressions. This contradiction between the surface sentiment and the intended one creates a complex challenge for sentiment analysis systems.

Sarcasm detection received attention in other languages, but Arabic still lags behind. There have been few efforts on Arabic sarcasm detection such as the works of (Karoui et al., 2017; Ghanem et al., 2020) and the shared task held by (Ghanem et al., 2019). There have been some recent efforts to build standard datasets for this task such as (Abbes et al., 2020; Abu Farha and Magdy, 2020).

The shared task on Sarcasm and Sentiment Detection in Arabic will be held with WANLP@EACL2021. The shared task will focus on analysing tweets and identifying their sentiment and whether a tweet is sarcastic or not.