PopSci releases the terrifying news that computers can decode our humor now. We can’t tell jokes over their little silicon heads any more – they’ve got an algorithm to detect 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.
The algorithms were then trained on that seed set of 80 sentences from the collection of reviews. These annotated sentences helped the algorithm learn what sorts of words and patterns distinguish sarcastic remarks – those that mean the opposite of what they literally convey, or that convey a sentiment inconsistent with the literal reading.
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.
[via].