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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

#101

Post by MaxBarraclough »

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.

What does 'understand' mean, if not something functional? You mean consciousness? Tough question to answer.

Are you familiar with Daniel Dennett's 'Competence without comprehension' ideas? He points out for instance that even a very simple computer is far better at division and exponentiation than even the smartest human. It does this without any comprehension at all - a pocket calculator is far too simple to have any meaningful understanding of anything, but that has zero impact on its functional usefulness.

Another favourite example of his is evolution by natural selection.

Annoyingly I couldn't find a brief online article on the topic by the man himself.

Re: Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm

#102

Post by schoen »

espe wrote: post #97
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…

it would ultimately more fruitful to treat irony as a semantic phenomenon, as belonging to the spectrum of tropes such as metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche. how should treating it as a violation tell you more about how it works?

People deploying Gricean maxims don't necessarily regard them as prescriptive, although sometimes listeners may get angry at speakers who violate them. For example, Wikipedia quotes Kent Bach as saying that these maxims

> are not sociological generalizations about speech, nor they are moral prescriptions or proscriptions on what to say or communicate. Although Grice presented them in the form of guidelines for how to communicate successfully, I think they are better construed as presumptions about utterances, presumptions that we as listeners rely on and as speakers exploit.

Wikipedia says Grice also "found it interesting when [the maxims] were not respected, namely either "flouted" (with the listener being expected to be able to understand the message) or "violated" (with the listener being expected to not note this)" -- the former including the case of sarcasm.

Re: Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm

#103

Post by JamieBeckett »

yeukhon wrote: post #61
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.

Is there an online demo? Or a recording? Would love to see it! And how did you get the data? Is there a public dataset or did you crawl on your own?

The researchers had something online at one point, but it wasn't working when I needed the link for the story. They said they planned to fix it, but so far they haven't.

Re: Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm

#104

Post by dang »

aalleavitch wrote: post #98
dang wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't take personal swipes or post unsubstantive comments. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It wasn’t a personal swipe, it was a friendly joke (I’m a front-end dev too). What qualifies as an unsubstantive comment? People around here are so uptight sometimes.

Your intent is obvious to you but only to you, and if you don't find an unambiguous way to encode it into your message, few people are going to get it.

One problem here might be that you're applying the standard of in-person conversation where it doesn't apply, at least not without modification. Interpreting my response, and that of users flagging, as "uptight" is a similar confusion. In person we'd all just laugh at the friendly joke and respond in kind. But the conditions are quite different here, as measured by how frequently such comments turn into brawls, and if we want to keep this place going for thoughtful conversation, we need standards that work on the internet.

Re: Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm

#105

Post by aalleavitch »

dang wrote: post #104
aalleavitch wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn’t a personal swipe, it was a friendly joke (I’m a front-end dev too). What qualifies as an unsubstantive comment? People around here are so uptight sometimes.

Your intent is obvious to you but only to you, and if you don't find an unambiguous way to encode it into your message, few people are going to get it. One problem here might be that you're applying the standard of in-person conversation where it doesn't apply, at least not without modification. Interpreting my response, and that of users flagging, as "uptight" is a similar confusion. In person we'd all just laugh at…

Perhaps you’re right; it’s the kind of comment that would be obvious to my group of friends in other online communities, but I’m making too many assumptions about the audience here and how adversarial discussions can get. It’s one of the reasons I struggle with bigger online communities where you can’t as easily develop a report. Next time I’m joking around I’ll try to slip in a disclaimer even if it takes some of the oomph out of my joke :P.

Re: Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm

#106

Post by knowThySelfx »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #101
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.

What does 'understand' mean, if not something functional? You mean consciousness? Tough question to answer. Are you familiar with Daniel Dennett's 'Competence without comprehension' ideas? He points out for instance that even a very simple computer is far better at division and exponentiation than even the smartest human. It does this without any comprehension at all - a pocket calculator is far too simple to have an…

Yeah I had consciousness in mind.

Re: Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm

#107

Post by bcaulfield »

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…

So, is it the Austrian who is not picking up on the sarcasm? Or the German.

Re: Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm

#108

Post by dang »

aalleavitch wrote: post #105
dang wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your intent is obvious to you but only to you, and if you don't find an unambiguous way to encode it into your message, few people are going to get it. One problem here might be that you're applying the standard of in-person conversation where it doesn't apply, at least not without modification. Interpreting my response, and that of users flagging, as "uptight" is a similar confusion. In person we'd all just laugh at…

Perhaps you’re right; it’s the kind of comment that would be obvious to my group of friends in other online communities, but I’m making too many assumptions about the audience here and how adversarial discussions can get. It’s one of the reasons I struggle with bigger online communities where you can’t as easily develop a report. Next time I’m joking around I’ll try to slip in a disclaimer even if it takes some of th…

Thanks!

Re: Like an AI Could Ever Spot Sarcasm

#109

Post by freeflight »

gowld wrote: post #56
freeflight wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be a coping mechanism for depressive people just like cynism, at least I know that it serves that function for me: Can't be straight up negative, for dragging the mood down, so I'll settle for some sarcasm.

You are likely not fooling anyone with your sarcasm.

It's not about fooling anybody, I consider it more like gallows humor.
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