You’re probably really worried that your robot can’t tell when you’re making fun of it. I sure am. It keeps me up at night.
Thank goodness some really smart guys are on the case. Popular Science, which is as popular as it is scientific, reports this incredibly important news:
An Israeli research team has developed a machine algorithm that can recognize sarcasm.
SASI, a Semi-supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification, can recognize sarcastic sentences in product reviews online with pretty astounding 77 percent precision. To create such an algorithm, the team scanned 66,000 Amazon.com product reviews, with three different human annotators tagging sentences for sarcasm. The team then identified certain sarcastic patterns that emerged in the reviews and created a classification algorithm that puts each statement into a sarcastic class.
What a valuable use of their time!
They then turned the algorithm loose on an evaluation set. Pattern evaluation efficiency scored accurately 81 percent of the time, while the overall precision of the pattern recognition/sarcasm categorizing algorithm was accurate in 77 percent of instances. Not bad for a computer’s first shot at interpreting the human sense of humor.
Yeah. That’s great. Don’t worry about the other 23 percent, genius. We’re all really proud of you anyway.