A research team at Hebrew University in Israel has developed a computer program that can recognize sarcasm with about 77% accuracy:
To create such an algorithm, the team scanned 66,000 Amazon.com product reviews, with three different human annotators tagging sentences for sarcasm. The team then identified certain sarcastic patterns that emerged in the reviews and created a classification algorithm that puts each statement into a sarcastic class.
The algorithms were then trained on that seed set of 80 sentences from the collection of reviews. These annotated sentences helped the algorithm learn what sorts of words and patterns distinguish sarcastic remarks – those that mean the opposite of what they literally convey, or that convey a sentiment inconsistent with the literal reading.
http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-05/computer-algorithm-can-recognize-sarcasm-which-soooo-cool | Image: Fox
Previously:
Sarcasm Punctuation Mark
Sarcasm is an Evolutionary Skill
I have to wonder how skewed their data is, though. I mean, the Three Wolf Moon shirt really DOES get you laid and cure disease, but such testimonials are often misinterpreted as sarcasm.