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Software Recognizes Sarcastic Tweets

Posted by StoneLion on from the sure-it-can dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Even humans sometimes fail to recognize sarcasm and irony; can machines do better? An algorithm that identifies sarcastic tweets (PDF) on Twitter and sarcastic sentences in product reviews on Amazon will be presented next week in the International Conference for Weblogs and Social Media in Washington, DC, and in the Computational Natural Language Learning in Sweden in July. A team from the Hebrew University, Israel, has developed an algorithm that identifies sarcastic sentences by using a machine learning technique in which a small number of sarcastic sentences act as seeds for the software to learn and generalize upon. The algorithm can then identify sarcastic sentences that are nothing like the examples. The variety of recognized sarcastic sentences is impressive, though the results are not perfect. But again, we don't do it so well ourselves, do we?"

6 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. Software Recognizes Sarcastic Tweets? by nacturation · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yeah, sure it does.

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    1. Re:Software Recognizes Sarcastic Tweets? by binarylarry · · Score: 4, Funny

      I'm not so sure I'd jump to the conclusion that this is useful.

      Determining the amount of sarcasm in bird calls doesn't seem to be an effective way to use research money IMO.

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    2. Re:Software Recognizes Sarcastic Tweets? by clickety6 · · Score: 4, Funny

      The professor was lecturing the class.

      "So while two negatives make a positive, two positives can never make a negative"

      An answering voice came from the back of the class:

      "Yeah, right"

       

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  2. Oblig. Simpsons by billius · · Score: 5, Funny

    A sarcasm detector, that's a real useful invention!

  3. Re:This is great! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    You don't have to be sarcastic, they might really find this useful.

  4. Re:I don't see this as a problem by aicrules · · Score: 4, Funny

    I opened my sarcasm tag about 28 years ago and don't plan on closing it any time soon. That has forced me to come up with a new language nuance that I like to call "more sarcastic than usual". But really that just means I add an extra, overemphasized "really" ahead of the point of super sarcasm.