Why Sarcasm Is Such a Problem In Artificial Intelligence (thestack.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A new paper from researchers in India and Australia, "Automatic Sarcasm Detection: A Survey," highlights one of the strangest and ironically most humorous facets of the problems in machine learning and humour. The paper outlines ten years of research efforts from groups interested in detecting sarcasm in online sources. It details the ways that academia has approached the sarcasm problem, including flagging authors and ring-fencing sarcastic data. However, the report concludes that the solution to the problem is not necessarily one of pattern recognition [PDF], but rather a more sophisticated matrix that has some ability to understand context.

Comments

Wait, Are you saying we shouldn't eat children?

[goombah99]

I'm a devoted follower of Dr. Johnathan Swift and I was persuaded by his logical essay "For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland,
from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick.". I was in fact arguing with my google car the other day about running over some filthy budernsome tyke and the google car AI was pretty darn adamant but eventually came around to seeing it my way after I instructued to parse some Swift. Sadly by then the succulent 28 pounder had wander off and no meal was to be had.

Re:Solution?

[squiggleslash]

Cultural and social cues too. British people, for example, frequently accuse people from a certain large Northern European country of having no sense of humor. Why? Well, because when they/we (I'm an ex-Brit) make sarcastic comments in front of them, said Northern Europeans take it seriously.

Now I have to assume sarcasm is fairly universal. I'd be surprised if aliens from the Planet Thargh IV are not familiar with the basic concept of "saying the opposite of what you mean because it's absurd, and finding humor in its absurdity". So the chances of said country not actually actually being familiar with the concept is pretty unbelievable.

More likely is that the transmission - the social cues, the way English speaking people exaggerate the first few words of a sarcastic sentence ("Oh a sarcasm detected. Well that's a useful invention!") to indicate that we're being sarcastic and not serious - is different.

There's another location where sarcasm just never seems to work (and, alas, I'm dumb enough not to realize it half the time): The Internet. Or rather, written text, where sarcasm is interpreted as stupidity more often than not. We've even developed cues to try to ensure it's not misinterpretted, from "/s" to fake HTML tags. Again, this suggests everything is about the cues.

Computers probably can detect sarcasm if taught the cues. It ought to be easy: look for cues, determine meaning of sentence, if cues present and interpretation in local context is absurd, call laugh().

Or raiseEyebrow(). Whatever seems appropriate for the lowest form of wit...