Thomas Carlyle saw sarcasm as the “language of the devil”, Oscar Wilde saw it as the lowest form of wit and Fyodor Dostoyevsky saw it as the last refuge of the mortally offended. Computers struggle to see it at all.
Lately, though, several teams of researchers have been trying to build software capable of working out when “I’m so glad you forgot our wedding anniversary for the 15th year in a row” is not a sign of marital harmony.
Scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) in Mumbai have developed an automatic sarcasm detector so sophisticated that it can spot the tonal difference between “Yes, please wake me up at 8am again” and “Yes, please wake me up at 3am again”.
Teaching machines