Watch your tone! Machine-learning algorithm can detect sarcasm in tweets

You know what I love on a Monday? Coming into work to be handed a lengthy machine learning paper by my editor and asked to write up its findings by lunchtime. Any human reader out there can probably identify hints of sarcasm in these sentences (as it happens, this is a double sarcasm bluff: the paper's actually pretty darn interesting). A computer, however, takes things literally -- which is exactly the problem. "The goal of my present work is sarcasm detection," Silvio Amir at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, told Digital Trends.