If we want to verbally communicate with computers, they're going to have to learn to recognize sarcasm. A team of programmers say they've done just that, with their Semi-Supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification (SASI).
After scanning 66,000 Amazon.com product reviews, which as you're probably aware are rife with sarcasm, they found 80 sentences containing patterns that enabled their software to understand sarcasm with 77% accuracy. Not bad, but it's going to take a lot more than rote learning of a few common sarcastic phrases for computers to master the art of sarcasm.
Even so, this is a great start. Accurate speech recognition is enormously difficult, and sarcasm is sometimes almost impossible to interpret. Reminds us of the professor who pointed out numerous instances of double negatives, and then declared there was no such thing as a double positive in the English language. Muttered someone in the back row, "Yeah, right."
Posts
