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Review of English literature on figurative language applied to social networks

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Abstract

For a long time, figurative language was studied merely from linguistic perspectives, yet it has lately captured the attention of other fields, such as natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and machine learning. The increasing interest in figurative language calls for a clear overview of figurative language research. To address this need, we present a review of English literature on figurative language applied to social networks in a five-year period: from 2013 to 2017. The aim of this review is to identify the most commonly researched figurative devices, as well as their discriminant features, detection approaches and methods, and languages in which they are studied. To this end, we analyze and evaluate 521 research works and present 45 primary studies. The results show that sarcasm is the most studied figurative device, with 56% of the total frequencies. Also, 87% of the studies are based on the supervised machine learning approach, and the support vector machine classifier has been the most used to detect the different types of figurative language (i.e., figurative devices). Similarly, more than half of the literature focuses on figurative language in English.

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Notes

  1. https://twitter.com.

  2. https://www.facebook.com.

  3. http://figurative-language.webnode.mx/.

  4. http://dis.um.es/∼valencia/SatiricalTwitterDataSet.zip.

  5. http://alt.qcri.org/semeval2015/task11/.

  6. http://sempub.taln.upf.edu/tw/clicit2014/.

  7. http://sempub.taln.upf.edu/tw/sepln2015/.

  8. http://sempub.taln.upf.edu/tw/ijcai2015/.

  9. http://di.ionio.gr/hilab/doku.php?id=start:websent.

  10. http://liks.fav.zcu.cz/sarcasm/.

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Acknowledgements

Authors María del Pilar Salas-Zárate and Mario Andrés Paredes-Valverde are supported by the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT), the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP), and the Mexican government. Additionally, this work was supported by Tecnológico Nacional de Mexico (TecNM) and the Secretariat of Public Education (SEP) through PRODEP (Programa para el Desarrollo Profesional Docente).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tecnológico Nacional de México/I. T. Orizaba, Av. Oriente 9 No. 852, Col. E. Zapata, 94320, Orizaba, Veracruz, Mexico

    María del Pilar Salas-Zárate, Giner Alor-Hernández & Mario Andrés Paredes-Valverde

  2. CONACYT-Tecnológico Nacional de México/I. T. Orizaba, Av. Oriente 9, No. 852, Col. E. Zapata, 94320, Orizaba, Veracruz, Mexico

    José Luis Sánchez-Cervantes

  3. Department of Industrial Engineering, Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico

    Jorge Luis García-Alcaraz

  4. Departamento de Informática y Sistemas, Universidad de Murcia, Campus de Espinardo, 30100, Murcia, Spain

    Rafael Valencia-García

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  1. María del Pilar Salas-Zárate
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Appendix 1: Keyword-based search queries

Appendix 1: Keyword-based search queries

In this appendix, the search queries that were built to search for primary studies in each one of the selected repositories are presented.

ACM Digital Library: It offers an advanced search to look for keywords in titles and abstracts.

acmdlTitle: (+(“figurative language” irony ironic sarcasm sarcastic satirical satire humor) +(“social web” “social networks” microblogs “social media” twitter Facebook)) OR recordAbstract: (+(“figurative language” irony ironic sarcasm sarcastic satirical satire humor) +(“social web” “social networks” microblogs “social media” twitter Facebook)) Year: 2013–2017

IEEE Xplore Digital Library: The advanced search option allows keywords to be searched in titles and abstracts.

(((“figurative language” OR irony OR ironic OR sarcasm OR sarcastic OR satirical OR satire OR humor) AND (“social networks” OR “social web” OR microblogs OR “social media” OR Twitter OR Facebook))) Year: 2013–2017

ScienceDirect: It provides an advanced search option to look for keywords in abstracts, titles, and in the keywords section of papers.

pub-date > 2012 and TITLE-ABSTR-KEY ((“figurative language” OR irony OR ironic OR sarcasm OR sarcastic OR satirical OR satire OR humor)) and TITLE-ABSTR-KEY ((“social networks” OR “social web” OR microblogs OR “social media” OR Twitter OR Facebook)).

Springer: It provides an advanced search option, but it does not allow keywords to be searched in the abstracts or the titles. Instead, the search must be conducted on the whole documents. For this repository, we reduced the number of searched keywords, since we initially retrieved a great number of irrelevant documents.

irony|sarcasm|”Figurative language” and Twitter|Facebook|“social media”|“social networks” Year: 2013–2017

Wiley Online Library: It offers an advanced search option for keywords to be searched in titles, abstracts, or in whole documents.

(“figurative language” OR irony OR ironic OR sarcasm OR sarcastic OR satirical OR satire OR humor) in Article Titles AND (“social networks” OR “social web” OR microblogs OR “social media” OR Twitter OR Facebook) in Article Titles between years 2013 and 2017

Google Scholar: It provides an advanced search option to search for terms in whole documents or in the titles. We decided to conduct a title search to refine the results.

allintitle: “social web” OR “social networks” OR microblogs OR “social media” OR Facebook OR twitter AND “figurative language” OR irony OR ironic OR sarcasm OR sarcastic OR satirical OR satire OR humor Year: 2013–2017

Web of science: It provides a basic search option where keywords can be searched in the title and other search fields.

Title: ((“figurative language” OR irony OR ironic OR sarcasm OR sarcastic OR satirical OR satire OR humor) AND (“social networks” OR “social web” OR microblogs OR “social media” OR Twitter OR Facebook)) Year: 2013–2017.

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del Pilar Salas-Zárate, M., Alor-Hernández, G., Sánchez-Cervantes, J.L. et al. Review of English literature on figurative language applied to social networks. Knowl Inf Syst 62, 2105–2137 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-019-01425-3

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