The Center for Media Engagement congratulates Ashwin Rajadesingan for receiving the Test of Time Award from the Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) Conference organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
The award recognizes papers published at least 10 years ago that have made a sustained and significant impact. Rajadesingan’s paper, “Sarcasm Detection on Twitter: A Behavioral Modeling Approach” explores how sarcasm can be detected on Twitter using available contextual information. “I think what was unique about this work was that we were able to incorporate insights from decades of past social science research on the use of sarcasm in developing our sarcasm detection classifier,” shared Rajadesingan.
The awards committee noted about the honor, “This landmark paper studies a fundamental and difficult problem in understanding web contents, with a general approach grounded in psychology. It is one of the most important works on sarcasm detection, a problem that is of great relevance in coping with today’s polarizing social media. In full generality and with evolving sophistication of user texts, the problem is still unsolved even with large language models. This WSDM 2015 paper will have lasting value, by guiding modern AI in understanding sarcasm.”
Rajadesingan is a Senior Faculty Research Associate at the Center for Media Engagement and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a computational social scientist and design researcher studying how people engage with politics online.