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This 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
by dmreedy 9y ago
This 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.
- mirimir 9y ago> I would say based on my experience on the internet, that spotting sarcasm is frequently beyond human capability ... In a 1983 Usenet FAQ by Jerry Schwarz: "Avoid sarcasm and facetious remarks." More recently, aka Poe's Law.
- espe 9y agoit would ultimately more fruitful to treat irony as a semantic phenomenon, as belonging to the spectrum of tropes such as metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche. how should treating it as a violation tell you more about how it works?
- schoen 9y agoPeople deploying Gricean maxims don't necessarily regard them as prescriptive, although sometimes listeners may get angry at speakers who violate them. For example, Wikipedia quotes Kent Bach as saying that these maxims > are not sociological generalizations about speech, nor they are moral prescriptions or proscriptions on what to say or communicate. Although Grice presented them in the form of guidelines for how to communicate successfully, I think they are better construed as presumptions about utterances, presumptions that we as listeners rely on and as speakers exploit. Wikipedia says Grice also "found it interesting when [the maxims] were not respected, namely either "flouted" (with the listener being expected to be able to understand the message) or "violated" (with the listener being expected to not note this)" -- the former including the case of sarcasm.