English

Pragmatic Metacognitive Prompting Improves LLM Performance on Sarcasm Detection

Computation and Language 2024-12-09 v1

Abstract

Sarcasm detection is a significant challenge in sentiment analysis due to the nuanced and context-dependent nature of verbiage. We introduce Pragmatic Metacognitive Prompting (PMP) to improve the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in sarcasm detection, which leverages principles from pragmatics and reflection helping LLMs interpret implied meanings, consider contextual cues, and reflect on discrepancies to identify sarcasm. Using state-of-the-art LLMs such as LLaMA-3-8B, GPT-4o, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, PMP achieves state-of-the-art performance on GPT-4o on MUStARD and SemEval2018. This study demonstrates that integrating pragmatic reasoning and metacognitive strategies into prompting significantly enhances LLMs' ability to detect sarcasm, offering a promising direction for future research in sentiment analysis.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2412.04509,
  title  = {Pragmatic Metacognitive Prompting Improves LLM Performance on Sarcasm Detection},
  author = {Joshua Lee and Wyatt Fong and Alexander Le and Sur Shah and Kevin Han and Kevin Zhu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.04509},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

Accepted at COLING 2024, CHum Workshop

R2 v1 2026-06-28T20:24:45.606Z