Application and Analysis of a Multi-layered Scheme for Irony on the Italian Twitter Corpus TWITTIRÒ

In this paper we describe the main issues emerged within the application of a multi-layered scheme for the fine-grained annotation of irony (Karoui et al., 2017) on an Italian Twitter corpus, i.e. TWITTIRÒ, which is composed of about 1,500 tweets with various provenance. A discussion is proposed about the limits and advantages of the application of the scheme to Italian messages, supported by an analysis of the outcome of the annotation carried on by native Italian speakers in the development of the corpus. We present a quantitative and qualitative study both of the distribution of the labels for the different layers involved in the scheme which can shed some light on the process of human annotation for a validation of the annotation scheme on Italian irony-laden social media contents collected in the last years. This results in a novel gold standard for irony detection in Italian, enriched with fine-grained annotations, and in a language resource available to the community and exploitable in the crossand multi-lingual perspective which characterizes the work that inspired this research.