Wednesday 26 May 2010

Israelis can recognise sarcasm

A Great Catchy Name: Semi-Supervised Recognition of Sarcastic Sentences in Online Product Reviews. What an amusing title for a research report on teaching computers to detect sarcasm in written text.

Computer scientists at a university in Israel 'taught' an algorithm to recognise sarcasm by showing it about 5,500 sentences from Amazon product reviews that human volunteers said were or were not sarcastic.

This page has a few of the sarcastic reviews.

Here are some definitions of sarcasm.

I wonder if they'll buy the algorithm a graduation gift now that it's finished learning how to communicate more fully with the human race. They could buy it a downloadable punctution mark for sarcasm, the SarcMark.

4 comments:

Lynn said...

If only that algorithm could progress to identifying the fine shades of meaning that are lumped under 'sarcastic' - ironic, sardonic, flippant, satirical, etc.

parlance said...

Lynn, I actually don't quite know what sarcasm is. I hadn't realised it has to be unpleasant until I looked at the definition. I like your overview of its shades of meaning.

Papillon Bleu said...

It is a pity that just a few people get it when it comes to irony or sarcasm. I'd rather save my saliva and ignore people who upset me. Sarcasm is only for people I respect...
(Please hope it doesn't make me sound like a pretentious snob)

It is nice to "hear" you have been to Chartwell. I feel very priviledged to have settled in such a beautiful part of England. Kent is like a fairytale place at every season.

parlance said...

Papillon, sarcasm can be fun between friends, but I agree it's no use for people who upset us. I agree it's a waste of breath and saliva!

You are so lucky to live in Kent and to have such a beautiful part of France to call home also!