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By Clay Dillow
www.popsci.com
05.18.2010 at 9:38 am
The pursuit of machine intelligence means we have to come up with ways to
communicate with our computers in a way both entities can understand. But while
computers process verbal commands in a straightforward fashion, humans tend to use
more sophisticated speech forms, employing slang or symbols to convey an idea. So 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.
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. Not bad for a computer’s first shot at interpreting the human sense of
humor.
This isn’t all just so your Roomba gets the joke when you tell it it sucks. Computer
programs that can recognize sarcastic statements could generate better personalized
content and make better recommendations to human users by not mistaking a product
review titled “keep your receipt” with a sound piece of online shopping advice. It
could also benefit opinion-mining systems that troll the Web trying to measure
public sentiment about a product or idea.
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-05/computer-algorithm-can-recognize-sarcasm-which-soooo-cool
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