Global Big Data Conference

Machines don't understand much of anything, especially not things such as ironic speech, but machine learning may be able to assist humanity in some way by counting the instances of linguistic and semantic constructions that indicate satire or misleading news, according to a new study by tech startup AdVerifai, in partnership with George Washington University and Amazon's AWS. A lot of nuances of writing are lost on the internet -- things such as irony. That's why satirical material such as the writing of Andy Borowitz on the website of The New Yorker magazine has to be labeled as satire, to make sure we know. Scientists in recent years have become concerned: What about writing that isn't properly understood, such as satire mistaken for the truth, or, conversely, deliberate disinformation campaigns that are disguised as innocent satire? And so began a quest to divine some form of machine learning technology that could automatically identify satire as such and distinguish it from deliberate lies.