Reza Zafarani, associate professor in electrical engineering and computer science, has received the Test of Time Award from the Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) Conference organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The award was presented at this year’s conference in Hanover, Germany.

WSDM publishes original, high-quality papers related to search and data mining on the web and the social web. It also hosts a highly selective conference that includes invited talks and peer-reviewed papers. The Test of Time Award recognizes published papers that have had a significant impact on the field of computing over an extended period of time.

Zafarani was awarded for the paper titled “Sarcasm Detection on Twitter: A Behavioral Modeling Approach” which discussed “detecting sarcasm automatically using textual data that users generate.” The key contribution of the paper is in integrating social science theories with machine learning techniques where the machine learning model incorporates social science findings across different disciplines such as linguistics, communication, philosophy and psychology.

The WSDM conference has provided the following statement in recognition of the contributions provided by this paper: “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.”