Robust Dual-Signal Fusion: Hybrid Neuro-Symbolic Gating with Compressed Chain-of-Thought Refinement for Irony Detection in Social Media Texts

Abstract

Small-scale Large Language Models (LLMs) natively default to literal semantic interpretations, making few-shot irony detection a persistent challenge in noisy, user-generated text. We introduce the Robust Dual-Signal (RDS) Fusion framework, a hybrid neuro-symbolic architecture that compresses Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning trajectories without Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Evaluated on a strictly held-out TweetEval test set ($N=734$), RDS achieves $78.1\%$ accuracy and a Macro F1 of $0.777$, matching the absolute performance ceiling of a fine-tuned BERTweet. On the heavily imbalanced iSarcasm dataset, the frozen CoT pipeline filters $22.5\%$ of out-of-distribution hallucinations, yielding a few-shot Macro F1 of $0.6726$ and Ironic F1 of $0.4821$, outperforming multiple heavily supervised SemEval transformer ensembles. Statistical ablation confirms this structural synergy: while adding the symbolic prior to the neural baseline yields an insignificant gain, and the RDS fusion is statistically insignificant compared to the combined RoBERTa and symbolic prior ablation; the concurrent fusion achieves a statistically significant improvement over the standalone baseline ($p=0.005$).