A knowledge-based weighted KNN for detecting Irony in Twitter

In this work, we propose a variant of a well-known instance-based algorithm: WKNN. Our idea is to exploit task-dependent features in order to calculate the weight of the instances according to a novel paradigm: the Textual Attraction Force, that serves to quantify the degree of relatedness between documents. The proposed method was applied to a challenging text classification task: irony detection. We experimented with corpora in the state of the art. The obtained results show that despite being a simple approach, our method is competitive with respect to more advanced techniques.