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Last year we were working on a rubber ducky debugging chatbot and relying a bit too heavily on StackOverflow data for conversational training data. It frequently gave sarcastic answers, especially if you asked for help concerning regular expressions.
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.
Computers are getting smarter. They can do many stuff faster than humans. They can even detect sarcasm. But do they "understand" it? Can Computers understand a subtle joke? Maybe we could train a Computer to detect jokes and make it laugh, but can it really understand a joke? Interesting topic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People didn’t expect to be humbled by a machine at the game of Go either. Yet here we are.
Apples and oranges comparison. Go is much closer to chess than it is to recognizing sarcasm.
Good computer chess play is based on a deterministic tree walking algorithm, something that’s been clearly in computers’ wheelhouse since forever.
Good computer go play is based on neural pattern recognition, which is also (probably) what human sarcasm detection is based on.
Yes, this is exactly what we need.
That's kind of my go-to, and I'd say about 20% of people overall don't get it. I hear "I can't tell if you are joking or not" all the time. I personally think both is a reasonable answer, but if we aren't able to teach people how such a sense of humor works, I don't have much hope for training an AI.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apples and oranges comparison. Go is much closer to chess than it is to recognizing sarcasm.
I’m not convinced. Good computer chess play is based on a deterministic tree walking algorithm, something that’s been clearly in computers’ wheelhouse since forever. Good computer go play is based on neural pattern recognition, which is also (probably) what human sarcasm detection is based on.
Conversation doesn't work like that, and takes a vast amount of information to understand whether someone is being sarcastic.
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, eac…
Computers are getting smarter. They can do many stuff faster than humans. They can even detect sarcasm. But do they "understand" it? Can Computers understand a subtle joke? Maybe we could train a Computer to detect jokes and make it laugh, but can it really understand a joke? Interesting topic.
Any criteria we can come up with for computers would then need to be applied to people. But how could we do that, when humans answer questions so differently? Do we ask one human? A sample of humans? All humans?
I don't think we'll find a criteria that delineates computers' "understanding" from our own. Perhaps the regularity from a sample of computers would be an indication.
All this is to say, what makes us think that humans understand subtle jokes?
Yes, this is exactly what we need.
Side note, is there a name for a type of humor where you are being facetious and serious at the same time? That's kind of my go-to, and I'd say about 20% of people overall don't get it. I hear "I can't tell if you are joking or not" all the time. I personally think both is a reasonable answer, but if we aren't able to teach people how such a sense of humor works, I don't have much hope for training an AI.