Slashdot Mirror
Tech Companies Looking Into Sarcasm Detection
Nerval's Lobster writes "Now here's the greatest thing ever: French tech firm Spotter has apparently devised an analytics platform capable of identifying sarcastic comments, according to the BBC. Spotter's platform scans social media and other sources to create reputation reports for clients such as the EU Commission and Air France. As with most analytics packages that determine popular sentiment, the software parses semantics, heuristics and linguistics. However, automated data-analytics systems often have a difficult time with some of the more nuanced elements of human speech, such as sarcasm and irony — an issue that Spotter has apparently overcome to some degree, although company executives admit that their solution isn't perfect. (Duh.) Spotter isn't alone: IBM, Salesforce, and other IT vendors are hard at work on analytics software that can more perfectly determine when you're mouthing off, you little punks. In theory, sarcasm detection can help with customer service, and judging how well products are doing on the open market... and we all know it's going to work perfectly, right? Nothing could possibly go wrong with automated platforms built to assess the nuances of human speech."
It shouldn't be. People have proposed punctuation marks for Sarcasm and Irony. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation#Irony_mark
The problem comes with professional violators of Poe's Law, such as Stephen Colbert's character, "Steven Colbert of the Colbert Report". He's a parody of every right wing nut job talk show host. His schtick is to take a right-wing agenda item and push it beyond its obvious short term benefits to its logical but socially detrimental conclusion, where he continues to defend it even more vigorously using Republican platform talking points, ad hominem attacks, and every other logical fallacy he can throw at it. He does this consistently without ever breaking character. And he has a flock of brilliant writers who are able to help him pull this off night after night.
As a matter of fact, he is so consistent that he was mistaken for an actual right wing comedian, and was invited to speak at the White House Correspondent's Dinner in 2006 where he lampooned George W. Bush to his face for fifteen straight minutes. Very few of the faithful present laughed at the routine. President Bush turned red almost from the get-go, politely grimaced out a smile, sat through the entire speech, and left the stage immediately after Colbert finished. I have no doubt that heads rolled within five minutes. ( My favorite joke from the event went something like, " 'Those naysayers claim that this administration is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.' That is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring! If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!" )
John
Implicitly we all realize that they want to filter sarcastic remarks out of online posting. Sarcasm is a very effective way to combine criticism and humor, and the result can be a very effective critique. This makes it very troublesome to those with power and money. They don't want anyone rocking the boat or getting uppity.
So instead of addressing potentially meaningful critical responses, or accepting the reality that people enjoy making bad jokes, they seek to automate the process of self serving censorship.
The intent is bad. I'm sure that organizations considering using this technology don't care about false positives. What they want is for you to STFU, unless you say what they want you to say.
So while Slashdot posters make the truly obvious jokes, or argue about technology and false positive/negative rates, this reveals the ugly truth about the intent of big online organizations. They want to enforce a one way channel where users are censored. Considering that Slashdot considers itself to be an elite corner of the internet, I find it pathetic that no one has a clue about what this means.
Why is Snark Required?