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Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm

blogs.nvidia.com

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Re: Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm

#71

Post by interfixus »

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #22

To be perfectly fair, human beings can't pick up on sarcasm reliably: or at the very least it seems to be cultural/contextual. Australians/brits consistently bemoan the inability of Americans to understand deadpan and sarcasm. And I'm even reminded of one of my European friends (from Austria) bemoaning conversations with Germans along the lines of: Austrian: "could you be any more condescending!?" German: "yes I coul…

That is very much a statistically significant thing, yes. I'm Danish. Get along fine with Brits and Aussies, deadpans, understatements and poisonous sarcastic barbs translating well enough both ways. With Americans present, experience has taught me to shift into a far more cautious mode. And often these days, what Americans describe as irony, I fail to recognize as such.

A very broad generalization, of course, but has served me well enough as survival guide.

Re: Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm

#72

Post by colejohnson66 »

jboggan wrote: post #9

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.

Did it respond with Zalgo if you asked about Regex and HTML? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...

Re: Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm

#73

Post by knowThySelfx »

tinymollusk wrote: post #69
knowThySelfx wrote: post #62

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.

We live in such interesting times! 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 th…

It is all context oriented. Lets see how these things develop. Lets ask a computer who just laughed at a joke "Why did you laugh? Or what made you laugh? Or Why did you find it funny?", and see what replies we get :D

Re: Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm

#74

Post by brisance »

Declanomous wrote: post #67
School-Cotton wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

On the other hand, go operates in a much more finite universe than conversation does. You have 2 pieces, and a number of places to put them. You have a goal. Conversation doesn't work like that, and takes a vast amount of information to understand whether someone is being sarcastic.

So you’re saying that the people cited in the article accomplished something more significant than the AlphaGo team…?

Re: Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm

#75

Post by [deleted] »

dmreedy wrote: post #63

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…

[deleted]

Re: Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm

#76

Post by perl4ever »

dmreedy wrote: post #63

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…

That's a very good summary. I would say based on my experience on the internet, that spotting sarcasm is frequently beyond human capability, so it's not realistic to do it with an AI any time soon.

Besides communicating with a recipient, subverting the cooperative principle can also be used to selectively communicate with one recipient out of many, or to mislead some or all.

A lot of things people want to calculate these days seem like absurd hubris to me, but I suppose that's also how progress has always occurred, by trying to do things that seem out of reach.

Re: Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm

#77

Post by perl4ever »

interfixus wrote: post #71
ACow_Adonis wrote: post #22

To be perfectly fair, human beings can't pick up on sarcasm reliably: or at the very least it seems to be cultural/contextual. Australians/brits consistently bemoan the inability of Americans to understand deadpan and sarcasm. And I'm even reminded of one of my European friends (from Austria) bemoaning conversations with Germans along the lines of: Austrian: "could you be any more condescending!?" German: "yes I coul…

That is very much a statistically significant thing, yes. I'm Danish. Get along fine with Brits and Aussies, deadpans, understatements and poisonous sarcastic barbs translating well enough both ways. With Americans present, experience has taught me to shift into a far more cautious mode. And often these days, what Americans describe as irony, I fail to recognize as such. A very broad generalization, of course, but ha…

In some parts, "irony police" are a running joke - people will explain why any given example of irony is not really ironic.

Re: Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm

#78

Post by fyi1183 »

brisance wrote: post #58
sidlls wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apples and oranges comparison. Go is much closer to chess than it is to recognizing sarcasm.

It may appear to you to be the case, but DeepBlue used a tree search algorithm. AlphaGo was an ensemble method that was based on neural networks, just like how the researchers used to detect sarcasm (sequence to vector). Read the article!

AlphaGo also uses a tree search algorithm.

Every tree search algorithm needs a guiding heuristic, and that's what AlphaGo replaces with a neural network.

So both DeepBlue and AlphaGo are fairly described as being based on tree search.

Re: Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm

#79

Post by fyi1183 »

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #22

To be perfectly fair, human beings can't pick up on sarcasm reliably: or at the very least it seems to be cultural/contextual. Australians/brits consistently bemoan the inability of Americans to understand deadpan and sarcasm. And I'm even reminded of one of my European friends (from Austria) bemoaning conversations with Germans along the lines of: Austrian: "could you be any more condescending!?" German: "yes I coul…

Honest question: does the Austrian in your example not understand the deadpan/sarcasm or is he/she merely annoyed by it? Sometime it may not be a question of understanding but just of preferred communication patterns.

But yeah, there's definitely a lot of culture and context involved.

Re: Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm

#80

Post by perl4ever »

Declanomous wrote: post #66
matte_black wrote: post #40

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.

If I was trying to explain humor to an alien, I would say it's a pleasurable sensation created by the resolution of ambiguity or uncertainty in the communications between two or more people. This is achieved by performing similar mental operations and reaching the same result as each other.

So typically, you say something, and someone understands that it is not serious, and they laugh at the point at which they realize you two understand each other.

Your style of humor is more evolved, in that it adds an additional step, where first they think you are not serious, and then they understand you are, and if they get it, they laugh because they have completed the path to a shared understanding. It may not be appreciated so much, because since the journey is more difficult, the listener may infer that you are trying to put down people who are not sufficiently quick witted.

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