C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pa la guerre
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Software is developed that detects sarcasm
A CRACK TEAM of Israeli boffins has developed an important tool that might enable the United States to take its proper place in the world.
Ever since the country was founded by humourless Protestants who were escaping the UK's cavalier attitudes, people in the US have been crippled by the lack of a gene to detect sarcasm. This has led them into all sorts of problems on the international scene where they have failed to see how people in other more sophisticated nations take the Michael out of them as they stroll around cultural landmarks wearing loud shirts and talking in big loud voices.
For a couple of hundred years these generously proportioned types have assumed that the citizens of other nations were just being friendly as they extracted naive US dollars while managing to be completely and utterly rude.
Now an Israeli team from the Hebrew University hopes to change all that with special software called SASI, which means "Semi-supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification".
To find a good source of sarcasm from which to build their algorithms they decided that product reviews, particularly on Amazon, were the best place to start. The team scanned 66,000 Amazon.com product reviews, with three different human annotators tagging sentences for sarcasm.
They discovered sarcastic patterns 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. They avoided looking at any articles from The INQUIRER, particularly those that mentioned Apple, out of a fear that the system would blow up.
Apparently the computer could guess that the person was joking more than 77 per cent of the time. This was much better than your average American, who got it right only 20 per cent of the time, and Macworld readers, who never got it.
It is envisaged that Americans will use the algorithms for an app on their phones to see if the people they are talking with are using sarcasm.
On the plus side they will discover how much the rest of the world really hates them. On the negative side they do have lots of guns and the odd notion of 'pre-emptive defence' against people that they don't like. µ
Tags: Boffin watch
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That's a real useful invention.
(Sarcasm detector explodes)
"Sassy" is an American word.
I wonder if the method is actually discussing sarcasm or other factors associated with sarcasm. Being British, Jewish, female, or gay come to mind. I can't think of a 4, but Stephen Fry and Sandi Toksvig are at least 3, and Ruby Wax a 3.5. For instance I imagine that sentences ending in the word "girlfriend" are disproportionately likely to be sarcastic.
This may be good enough to work.
(Which isn't sarcastic, since I'm a 1 and I didn't say "girlfriend".)
I'm thinking of the story (having forgotten again whether it's apocryphal) that the prototype military "is there a camouflaged tank in this picture" software worked less well in reality than on the test data, where all the "with tank" pictures were taken on a fine day, so it was actually detecting sunny weather. Which also could account for some of the "Middle East, weapons of mass destruction" difficulties.
As an American, I'd like to say that I don't get it.
@bigger_luddite That might be true, but if that's what the people really want.. what can you do? What's more annoying is that they push everything they want on the rest of the world, but you can't even complain there because everybody accepts that as a normal state of affairs and they encourage it instead of complaining, let alone halt it and refuse it.
I've no argument with the truthful digs above. For sure the US is rapidly deteriorating. Until recently we had no large numbers of inherited parasites who are now forcing the working class back into Old World feudalism and building an empire not by trade but by war. Those parasites can't be open and honest about their goals; in fact, it's safest to believe the opposite of what they say.
The way forward, then, isn't for Americans to learn sarcasm, but for everyone concerned about the looming police state to tell the plain truth and call it a police state.
Americans can detect sarcasm. It's irony they have an issue with, ironically enough. Just check the lyrics of the song "Isn't It Ironic?", to which the answer is generally "Actually, no".
Sarcasm at its best.
Can't wait to hear what fanbois have to say to this article.