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Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm
- woliveirajr 9y ago> So now, computers can be as sarcastic as the rest of us. That sounds just great. I love how sarcasm has so many subtle ways to be use to break tensions in some meetings, and how it can quickly derail any light conversation into some almost-nuclear mood. But computers generating sarcasm, well... that will put a whole new level to automatic chat bots.
- ateesdalejr 9y agoYes! I need alexa to be sarcastic.
- posterboy 9y agoThat's irony, not sarcasm.
- civilian 9y agoSarcasm is a great tool. But there are a couple of people I know who never turn off their "Sarcastic tone", and it becomes impossible to tell what's genuine and what's bullshit. I try to tell them that their noise-to-signal ratio is bad, but they um... react defensively.
- RobertDeNiro 9y ago“sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.”
- ficklepickle 9y agoSo true. This was me, once upon a time. Unfortunately, it tends to have the opposite effect and push people away.
- notahacker 9y agoin Britain we mostly do the sarcasm without any change in tone...
- alexmat 9y agoMaybe they have a speech impediment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziH9St7ajuw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziH9St7ajuw
- freeflight 9y agoIt can be a coping mechanism for depressive people just like cynism, at least I know that it serves that function for me: Can't be straight up negative, for dragging the mood down, so I'll settle for some sarcasm.
- gowld 9y agoYou are likely not fooling anyone with your sarcasm.
- freeflight 9y agoIt's not about fooling anybody, I consider it more like gallows humor.
- denzil_correa 9y ago> I try to tell them that their noise-to-signal ratio is bad, but they um... react defensively. Defense mechanism could be one possible explanation.
- munchbunny 9y agoThe key thing about using sarcasm is that you should never direct it at someone you're talking to. Doing that is a great way to make someone instantly dislike you. Sarcasm as a form of humor is too easy to do. You don't have to be clever. You just have to look down on someone/something and then caricature it. Whoever does that too much just seems unlikable. When you're actually clever or subtle about it, people tend to enjoy the twist that makes the joke.
- sbarre 9y ago> “We found lots of tweets, especially in politics, to be sarcastic,” he said, in what may be the biggest understatement so far of 2018.
- JoeAltmaier 9y agoIt's more than incongruity. Context is king. "I like being ignored" is sarcasm. But followed up with "No, really, I like being ignored. Its like a super power! I can ..." is serious (sort of).
- ACow_Adonis 9y agoAnd then you get people like me, where "I like being ignored" is not sarcasm, but a commentary/personality preference related to disliking a cultures obsession with fame and popularity and struggling to think of anything worse than being recognised/constantly under surveillance. As you said, context is everything. It is literally impossible to detect sarcasm reliably with only the sentence in which sarcasm is contained.
- Retra 9y agoThere's also a blurry line between sarcasm and lies. I'll often say things that are patently untrue to people with the expectation that they know the truth (and me) well enough to get that I'm not serious. For instance, to my sister: "I hate you." - sarcasm. "I've already told you many times that I hate you." - obvious lie, maybe sarcasm?
- gowld 9y agoEven humans have great difficulty discerning sarcasm in text. Poe's law is the famous statement that sarcasm is not distinguishable once the Overton window is sufficiently wide.
- pvdebbe 9y agoIn a standup context I'd read the continuation as sarcasm as well, as a part of a stream of jokes to come.
- Stratoscope 9y agoLike a human being could ever read that text. If you're having as much trouble reading it as I was, open the developer tools and on the body style, remove "DINPro" from the font-family, turn off the font-weight: 300 or change it to 400, and increase the font-size to 16px or whatever size you like. If the AIs ever do take over, my one request is that they use plenty of sarcasm when they talk about designers who think unreadable text with substandard font-weight is a good thing. Of course, being AIs, maybe they could care less.
- kalms 9y agoYou even left a comment on the site writing that. Don't be an asshole.
- Stratoscope 9y agoFair enough, I edited the comment I posted there to take out the sarcasm and just kept the note on how to make the page readable. OK now?
- bcaulfield 9y agoPut it back in. We love sarcasm!
- Stratoscope 9y agoOK, chief! I even stepped it up and called it "scrawny text" for good measure. I am like a politician waffling and flip-flopping as the polling winds blow to and fro. Hmm... Chicken and waffles sounds pretty good right now!
- bcaulfield 9y agoWill look into changing that font up, many thanks for the feedback!
- discreteevent 9y ago
- jboggan 9y agoLast year we were working on a rubber ducky debugging chatbot and relying a bit too heavily on StackOverflow data for conversational training data. It frequently gave sarcastic answers, especially if you asked for help concerning regular expressions.
- hinkley 9y agoName the bot Tony the Pony and call it a feature.
- yeukhon 9y agoIs there an online demo? Or a recording? Would love to see it! And how did you get the data? Is there a public dataset or did you crawl on your own?
- JamieBeckett 9y agoThe researchers had something online at one point, but it wasn't working when I needed the link for the story. They said they planned to fix it, but so far they haven't.
- colejohnson66 9y agoDid it respond with Zalgo if you asked about Regex and HTML? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...
- joshu 9y agoHe comes.
- delta1 9y ago"Use jQuery"
- golergka 9y agoThat sounds like a pretty good result. Yandex has released it's voice assistant a few months ago (wasn't big news here on HN because it's Russian-only), and one feature that separated it from all the rest was sarcasm and kind of dark humor it acquired. Wouldn't you want your chatbot to be sarcastic sometimes?
- qntmfred 9y agoI often recall this post from Andrej Karpathy when I'm noticing the current limitations of AI http://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer-vision/ http://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer-visio...
- blattimwind 9y ago> That was especially true for tweets that include numbers; their accuracy rate of 80 percent more than triples previous efforts. Which is to say that previous efforts had only half of the true positives a random number generator would have had. Neat.
- notahacker 9y agoSounds like previous efforts might even have been outperformed by a naive algorithm that purely looked for one word sentences like "right", "totally" and "neat" :-)
- ACow_Adonis 9y agoTo be perfectly fair, human beings can't pick up on sarcasm reliably: or at the very least it seems to be cultural/contextual. Australians/brits consistently bemoan the inability of Americans to understand deadpan and sarcasm. And I'm even reminded of one of my European friends (from Austria) bemoaning conversations with Germans along the lines of: Austrian: "could you be any more condescending!?" German: "yes I could be more condescending."...blank stare.
- interfixus 9y agoThat is very much a statistically significant thing, yes. I'm Danish. Get along fine with Brits and Aussies, deadpans, understatements and poisonous sarcastic barbs translating well enough both ways. With Americans present, experience has taught me to shift into a far more cautious mode. And often these days, what Americans describe as irony, I fail to recognize as such. A very broad generalization, of course, but has served me well enough as survival guide.
- perl4ever 9y agoIn some parts, "irony police" are a running joke - people will explain why any given example of irony is not really ironic.
- fyi1183 9y agoHonest question: does the Austrian in your example not understand the deadpan/sarcasm or is he/she merely annoyed by it? Sometime it may not be a question of understanding but just of preferred communication patterns. But yeah, there's definitely a lot of culture and context involved.
- bcaulfield 9y agoSo, is it the Austrian who is not picking up on the sarcasm? Or the German.
- cabalamat 9y agoSarcasm is almost certainly AI-complete. Consider this post: https://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2018/01/31/royal-mail-announces-commemorative-brexit-stamps/ https://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2018/01/31/royal-mail-announ... which is pretty easy for a human to tell is sarcastic, but would be difficult for an AI unless it actually understood it.
- gowld 9y agoWhy? It has a few tell-tale word choices, and image recognition would indicate that the stamp images are "wrong" and/or correlated to humor memes.
- cabalamat 9y agoGo and build an AI that detects sarcasm, then I will agree with you.
- razorunreal 9y agoEasy. "Don’t they make you proud to be British!" is incongruous because nobody is proud to be British! (I jest, please don't kill me)
- stochastic_monk 9y agoInherently ambiguous medium of hierarchical, ambiguous data requiring personal and situational context difficult to interpret. Surprise! NLP is still hard... which is good news for anyone interested in understanding language, neural networks, o the human condition.
- hx2a 9y agoIf anyone is interested in studying sarcasm themselves, there is a dataset available: A Large Self-Annotated Corpus for Sarcasm https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05579 https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05579 1.3 million sarcastic statements!
- mozumder 9y agoIf humans can’t identify sarcasm, why would you expect AI to? It’s like expecting AI to read handwriting, when people can’t even do that 100% of the time.
- brisance 9y agoPeople didn’t expect to be humbled by a machine at the game of Go either. Yet here we are.
- sidlls 9y agoApples and oranges comparison. Go is much closer to chess than it is to recognizing sarcasm.
- brisance 9y agoIt may appear to you to be the case, but DeepBlue used a tree search algorithm. AlphaGo was an ensemble method that was based on neural networks, just like how the researchers used to detect sarcasm (sequence to vector). Read the article!
- fyi1183 9y agoAlphaGo also uses a tree search algorithm. Every tree search algorithm needs a guiding heuristic, and that's what AlphaGo replaces with a neural network. So both DeepBlue and AlphaGo are fairly described as being based on tree search.
- umanwizard 9y agoI’m not convinced. Good computer chess play is based on a deterministic tree walking algorithm, something that’s been clearly in computers’ wheelhouse since forever. Good computer go play is based on neural pattern recognition, which is also (probably) what human sarcasm detection is based on.
- 9y ago
- matte_black 9y agoYes, this is exactly what we need.
- placebo 9y ago"Why stop now just when I’m hating it?" - Marvin the paranoid android
- Declanomous 9y agoSide note, is there a name for a type of humor where you are being facetious and serious at the same time? That's kind of my go-to, and I'd say about 20% of people overall don't get it. I hear "I can't tell if you are joking or not" all the time. I personally think both is a reasonable answer, but if we aren't able to teach people how such a sense of humor works, I don't have much hope for training an AI.
- r3dk1ng 9y agohttp://catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html maybe?
- perl4ever 9y agoIf I was trying to explain humor to an alien, I would say it's a pleasurable sensation created by the resolution of ambiguity or uncertainty in the communications between two or more people. This is achieved by performing similar mental operations and reaching the same result as each other. So typically, you say something, and someone understands that it is not serious, and they laugh at the point at which they realize you two understand each other. Your style of humor is more evolved, in that it adds an additional step, where first they think you are not serious, and then they understand you are, and if they get it, they laugh because they have completed the path to a shared understanding. It may not be appreciated so much, because since the journey is more difficult, the listener may infer that you are trying to put down people who are not sufficiently quick witted.
- ryacko 9y agoThe Secret Service did want a sarcasm detector. https://www.thedailybeast.com/secret-service-wants-a-sarcasm-detector https://www.thedailybeast.com/secret-service-wants-a-sarcasm...
- laretluval 9y agoThe point of sarcasm is to hide your true intent except for people who are sufficiently aligned with you to be able to decode it correctly. If computers can decode sarcasm then it is not effective. Then sarcasm will evolve.
- gowld 9y agoI trust many more details of the secrets of my life to computers than people. Computers are smarter than people in many areas, so sarcasm that only a computer recognizes is not a problem for sarcasm.
- fellellor 9y agoI have to note that often humans fail to detect sarcasm, and police forums with religious fervor demanding the application of those ridiculous "\s" tags wherever they be deemed necessary. Small wonder, why it would be difficult to catch in a program.
- chocolateboy 9y ago(The Groucho Marx joke isn't sarcasm.)
- knowThySelfx 9y agoComputers are getting smarter. They can do many stuff faster than humans. They can even detect sarcasm. But do they "understand" it? Can Computers understand a subtle joke? Maybe we could train a Computer to detect jokes and make it laugh, but can it really understand a joke? Interesting topic.
- knome 9y agoComputers will understand language like boats swim.
- tinymollusk 9y agoWe live in such interesting times! Any criteria we can come up with for computers would then need to be applied to people. But how could we do that, when humans answer questions so differently? Do we ask one human? A sample of humans? All humans? I don't think we'll find a criteria that delineates computers' "understanding" from our own. Perhaps the regularity from a sample of computers would be an indication. All this is to say, what makes us think that humans understand subtle jokes?
- knowThySelfx 9y agoIt is all context oriented. Lets see how these things develop. Lets ask a computer who just laughed at a joke "Why did you laugh? Or what made you laugh? Or Why did you find it funny?", and see what replies we get :D
- JetSpiegel 9y ago"I laughed because 'jmp 0xdeadbeef' leads to the sound playing routine"
- knowThySelfx 9y agomoo
- dmichulke 9y ago
- dmreedy 9y agoThis is neat. Sarcasm is hard because it's a violation of the cooperative principle. I think describing it as simply incongruity is understating the difficulty of the problem (that said, good enough for 80% accuracy on the task is nothing to sniff at). In communication, you've got two systems attempting to convey their internal, unobservable states to eachother. This happens across a number of different channels, each noisier and more imperfect than the next. Natural Language is lossy enough compression as it is. Now add idiolect, prosody, body language, context. And on top of that, the internal states of the two systems may only be alignable along the coarsest axes to begin with (do we share the same qualia?). The only way we can have any hope of understanding eachother is when we know both sides are trying their best to make themselves understood, as per Grice's maxims. Sarcasm is a form of dissembly, a deliberate subversion of the cooperative principle, that words mean things, for other means. Sometimes to communicate to others, who are not the target. Sometimes for the communicator's own personal satisfaction. Sometimes it's meant to be understood, but the drier the sarcasm, the fewer hints are given. And at the same time, in some cases, a sarcastic utterance is the most concise way of conveying information, if it is correctly received. Because acting in violation of typically observed rules of conversation carries its own set of semantics. It's another mode of communicating, and all of these different modes capture different lower-dimensional slices of the hyper-thing of mind-state and intent that they're purporting to convey. All that to say, that elsewhere in these comments, the problem has been described as AI Complete. I'd go a step further, and say that it's telepath-complete, to know the intent of another, and even then, knowing the accurate truth of the thing by oracle might end you up with less Information than if you'd just gotten the joke in the first place.
- schoen 9y agoFor people who aren't familiar with the Gricean maxims, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- perl4ever 9y agoThat's a very good summary. I would say based on my experience on the internet, that spotting sarcasm is frequently beyond human capability, so it's not realistic to do it with an AI any time soon. Besides communicating with a recipient, subverting the cooperative principle can also be used to selectively communicate with one recipient out of many, or to mislead some or all. A lot of things people want to calculate these days seem like absurd hubris to me, but I suppose that's also how progress has always occurred, by trying to do things that seem out of reach.
- kfe 9y agoLooking forward to Deep Sarcasm...
- mhd 9y agoCan't wait for the first next gen AI programming language to support an "as if" statement.
- espe 9y agoclaims too much. and the task definition seems off: sarcasm is more like a speaker attitude, while irony is the linguistic phenomenon. another case of "lets throw an ANN onto anything".