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<Paper uid="C96-2162">
  <Title>A Unified Theory of Irony and Its Computational Formalization</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Although non-literal language such as metaphor has become a popular topic in computational linguistics (Fass et al., 1991), no attention has been given to ironic uses of language. One reason for this imbalance is that traditional accounts of irony - and even default logic forlnalization (Perrault, 1990) - assume that irony communicates the opposite of the literal meaning. This assumption leads to the misconception that irony is governed only by a simple inversion mechanism, and thus it has no theoretical interest. Another reason is that studies of irony have been regarded as of no practical use for NLP systems. However, recent accounts denying the meaning-inversion assumption have revealed that irony is a more complicated pragmatic phenomenon governed by several mental processes (Kumon-Nakamnra et al., 1995), and dmt irony offers an effective way of accomplishing w~rious communication goals that are diff\]cult to convey literally (Roberts and Kreuz, \]994).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The aim of this paper is to propose a unified theory of irony that answers to three crucial questions in an unequivocal manner: (Q1) what are properties that distinguish irony from non-ironic utterances, (Q2) how do hearers recognize utterances to be ironic, and (Q3) what do ironic utterances convey to he~rers? Our theory provides a computationally feasible framework of irony as the first, step toward a full-fledged computational model of irony, and it can account for several empirical findings fi'om psycholinguistics. The essential idea underlying our theory is that an ironic utterance implicitly displays ironic environment, a special situation which has three properties for being ironic, but the hearer does not have to see all the three properties implicitly communicated in order to recognize the utterance to be ironic. Note that this paper focuses only on verbal irony, and thus situational irony I (i.e., situations are ironic) is beyond the scope of our theory.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses the problems of previous irony theories.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Section 3 presents our unified theory of irony that can cope with the problems, and its computational formalization. Finally, Section 4 suggests that our theory agrees well with several empirical findings.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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