Skip to main content

Watch your tone! Machine-learning algorithm can detect sarcasm in tweets

You know what I love on a Monday? Coming into work to be handed a lengthy machine learning paper by my editor and asked to write up its findings by lunchtime. What could be better?

Any human reader out there can probably identify hints of sarcasm in these sentences (as it happens, this is a double sarcasm bluff: the paper’s actually pretty darn interesting). A computer, however, takes things literally — which is exactly the problem.

Recommended Videos

“The goal of my present work is sarcasm detection,” Silvio Amir at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, told Digital Trends. “Given a social media post, the goal is to figure out whether a certain tweet is sarcastic or not. This is important because we’ve been using social media analysis to study a lot of things, such as political participation, or the way that people are reacting to certain subjects. There is a lot of misinformation out there on the internet. If you use machine-learning models to analyze these things at face value, or in a literal sense, you’ll get a distorted or misleading picture when people express certain views ironically or sarcastically. That’s because sarcasm means saying something which is the literal opposite of the real meaning.”

The work carried out by Amir and other researchers at the University of Lisbon and University of Texas at Austin aimed to right this wrong by creating a deep learning model that looks at users’ past tweets to work out whether a particular message seems out of character.

“For example, if a person posts positively about Donald Trump, but their past messages show they have often spoken negatively about him, that could be a clue or signal that the person is maybe being sarcastic,” Amir continued.

Of course, there are still challenges present. People can change their opinions over time, or the original tweets the system is taking as genuine may have been sarcastic. However, the project has impressively been shown to be more effective than other rival approaches when it comes to solving the sarcasm conundrum, with the AI correctly guessing whether a tweet is sarcastic or not 87 percent of the time.

We couldn’t be more impressed. (Like, for real!)

Luke Dormehl
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
The future of A.I.: 4 big things to watch for in the next few years
brain with computer text scrolling artificial intelligence

A.I. isn’t going to put humanity on the scrap heap any time soon. Nor are we one Google DeepMind publication away from superintelligence. But make no mistake about it: Artificial intelligence is making enormous strides.

As noted in the Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2021, last year the number of journal publications in the field grew by 34.5%. That’s a much higher percentage than the 19.6% seen one year earlier. A.I. is going to transform everything from medicine to transportation, and there are few who would argue otherwise.

Read more
Yes, there is now a washing machine for your AirPods
Cardlax Earbuds Washer

Until someone invents a cure for earwax, one thing will remain true: Your AirPods (or any other earbuds) are going to become disgusting, filthy messes over time and you will need to clean them.

And while there are plenty of tried-and-true ways of doing this manually -- we have a comprehensive AirPods cleaning guide right here -- there's now a device that promises to make the task a lot easier. Enter the Cardlax Earbuds Washer, a miniature washing machine made specifically for Apple's AirPods and AirPods Pro.

Read more
Clever new A.I. system promises to train your dog while you’re away from home
finding rover facial recognition app dog face big eyes

 

One of the few good things about lockdown and working from home has been having more time to spend with pets. But when the world returns to normal, people are going to go back to the office, and in some cases that means leaving dogs at home for a large part of the day, hopefully with someone coming into your house to let them out at the midday point.

Read more