Is this Tweet Satirical? A Computational Approach for Satire Detection in Spanish

Computational approaches to analyze figurative language are attracting a growing interest in Computational Linguistics. In this paper, we study the characterization of Twitter messages in Spanish that advertise satirical news. We present and evaluate a system able to classify tweets as satirical or not. To this purpose, we concentrate on the tweets published by several satirical and non-satirical Twitter accounts. We model the text of each tweet by a set of linguistically motivated features that aim at capturing the style more than the content of the message. Our experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms a word-based baseline. We also demonstrate that our system models global features of satirical language by showing that it is able to detect if a tweet contains or not satirical contents independently from the account that generated the tweet.