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Wow! New Algorithm Detects Sarcasm

  • PopSci, Wednesday, May 19, 2010 2:23 PM

An Israeli research team has developed a machine algorithm that can recognize sarcasm, reports Popular Science. To that we say: Big deal! SASI, a Semi-supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification, can apparently recognize sarcastic sentences in product reviews online with astonishing 77% precision. To create the 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.

Those engineers must be reeeaaally smart. "The algorithms were then trained on that seed set of 80 sentences from the collection of reviews," according to Popular Science. 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." We care! l

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