Computer Program Recognizes Sarcasm

May 30, 2010— -- Sarcasm is a useful way to blunt the impact of criticism by adding a twist of snide humor, as in this recent tweet: "Really love when the scope of a project I've been working on for a week changes in 10 min #sarcasm."

Without the help of a hash tag, though, people often miss the irony, especially when it's delivered online, where there are no contextual hints or social cues. To cut through the confusion, researchers have developed a computer program that can identify sarcasm in online communities with an accuracy rate of about 80 percent.

While there is still a long way to go before computers will be able to understand all the subtleties of humor, the new work might, among other practical applications, help companies sort through comments about their products to find out what customers really think.

Consider, for example, a website that allows users to post their opinions about the products it sells. One comment says, "The size of this camera is great. It fits right into my pocket." Another says, "The size of this camera is great. I need a porter to carry it."

"A typical summarization system will conclude that people are very, very happy with the size and weight" of the camera, said Oren Tsur, a computer scientist at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "Obviously, this is not the case."

Funny enough, Tsur's attempt to program a sarcasm detector started as a joke.

When he was a University freshman, he received an email that thanked him for his previous contributions to an annual conference and asked him to be that year's program chair. The email was clearly intended for someone else, but Tsur thought it was funny, so he responded with what he thought was an obviously sarcastic tone. His reply was taken seriously.

"They allowed me to postpone the deadline for submission and asked me what I was working on," Tsur said. "I wrote back that I was working on detecting irony in email. They didn't get that either."

Since then, Tsur's interest in sarcasm had turned serious. This week he plans to present a paper about his work at a meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in Washington, D.C.