Software Recognizes Sarcastic Tweets 168
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?"
Software Recognizes Sarcastic Tweets? (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, sure it does.
Oblig. Simpsons (Score:5, Funny)
Tweet from the developer (Score:4, Funny)
I don't see this as a problem (Score:2, Funny)
Just end your sarcasm tags before being sarcastic. This won't conform to W3C standards, however.
Will have very good recognition rate... (Score:3, Funny)
Given that sometimes not even humans understand when I am being sarcastic, I expect this software will have an exceptionally high recognition rate with very low false positives. A truly remarkable achievement and the one algorithm the human race has been waiting for!
Re:This is great! (Score:5, Funny)
You don't have to be sarcastic, they might really find this useful.
Re:I don't see this as a problem (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Software Recognizes Sarcastic Tweets? (Score:5, 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.
Oh, sure! (Score:4, Funny)
Testing (Score:3, Funny)
The algorithm can then identify sarcastic sentences that are nothing like the examples.
Place it in my office. If it still responds at the end of the week, it's not working correctly. If it's overloaded and partially melted, we've got a winner.
Re:This is great! (Score:3, Funny)
I'd have though that even autistics would be able to recognize horns, goat legs, and a pan pipe? Oh, satire.
For a real test (Score:3, Funny)
Sarcasm, older than we thought (Score:3, Funny)
It dates back into some of the great classic works of our time... upon reading Romeo and Juliet one critic was overheard saying:
"Nice play Shakespeare..."
or upon solving a great mystery, Watson was once overheard saying, "No shit Sherlock."
Tech behind this (Score:3, Funny)
Re:This is great! (Score:2, Funny)
How are mods supposed to moderate anything in this thread?
Like the fair, independent, open-minded, thoughtful people that you know they are.
Re:This is great! (Score:3, Funny)
Dude. He was being sarcastic.
77% accuracy? (Score:3, Funny)
Their algorithm gets 77% accuracy. I think I can do better:
# Estimated accuracy: 92.1%
isSarcastic(tweet) { return true; }
Or does that only work for slashdot comments?
Re:You Know DRM is a Pervasive Problem When ... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Software Recognizes Sarcastic Tweets? (Score:2, Funny)
This is brilliant!
What could possibly go wrong?
Re:Software Recognizes Sarcastic Tweets? (Score:5, 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"