Humans pick up on sarcasm instinctively and usually do not need help figuring out if, say, a
social media post has a mocking tone. Machines have a much tougher time with this because they are typically programmed to read text and assess images based strictly on what they see. So what's the big deal? Nothing, unless computer scientists could help machines better understand wordplay used in social media and on the internet. And it looks like they may be on the verge of doing just that.
Just what you needed—a sarcasm-detection engine that helps marketers tell whether you were praising or mocking their product, and adjust their messages to sell you more stuff. Yet promoters say savvier computers could also help law enforcement agencies distinguish legitimate threats from those that exaggerate or poke fun at serious topics, especially in Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr posts that use images. It might even help automated customer service systems figure out that you're upset, and route you to a real person or allow politicians to sense whether their messages are resonating with voters.
Rossano Schifanella, an assistant professor in computer science at the University of Turin, and a group of colleagues from internet company Yahoo! are trying to teach machines that humans do not always mean exactly what they say. What is new about their research, released earlier this month on the science publishing site ArXiv, is that they examined images as well as text in looking for clues to understand meaning. "What we observed is that if you just look at text, it isn't enough," Schifanella says. "The images provide crucial context." https://www.livescience.com/55915-computers-may-soon-sense-sarcasm.html
