How to Detect Sarcasm with Artificial Intelligence

A new AI tool funded in part by the U.S. military has proven adept at a task that has traditionally been very difficult for computer programs: detecting the human art of sarcasm. It could help intelligence officers or agencies better apply artificial intelligence to trend analysis by avoiding social media posts that aren't serious. Certain words in specific combinations can be a predictable indicator of sarcasm in a social media post, even if there isn't much other context, two researchers from the University of Central Florida noted in a March paper in the journal Entropy. Using a variety of datasets of posts from Twitter, Reddit, various dialogues and even headlines from The Onion, Garibay and his colleague Ramya Akula mapped out how some key words relate to other words. "For instance, words such as'just', 'again', 'totally', '!', have darker edges connecting them with every other word in a sentence. These are the words in the sentence that hint at sarcasm and, as expected, these receive higher attention than others," they write.