Skip to main content

Spring Deadline: Sunday, March 1 @ 11:59pm PT. Click here to apply.

Pragmatic Metacognitive Prompting Improves LLM Performance on Sarcasm Detection

Pragmatic Metacognitive Prompting Improves LLM Performance on Sarcasm Detection

December 1, 2025

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 perf...

Accepted to CHum @ COLING 2025

Authors: Joshua Lee, Wyatt Fong, Alexander Le, Sur Shah, Kevin Han, Kevin Zhu

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 MUStARD and SemEval2018 benchmarks.

Begin Your Journey

The application takes 10 minutes and is reviewed on a rolling basis. We look for strong technical signal—projects, coursework, or competition results—and a genuine curiosity to do real research.

If admitted, you will join a structured pipeline with direct mentorship to take your work from ideation to top conference submission at venues like NeurIPS, ACL, and EMNLP.