Sarcasm Software Is Dead Serious
If there’s one thing that Israelis don’t get, it’s sarcasm. Try being sarcastic, whether in English or in Hebrew, and more often than not it falls flat, sometimes leading to embarrassing misunderstandings.
Ironic, then, that Israeli academics have just made a breakthrough that will help the world know when somebody is being sarcastic. Hebrew University researchers have just developed an algorithm that can analyze text and determine whether the writer is being serious or sarcastic.
“In many cases, sarcasm is difficult even for people to recognize,” the lead researcher, Ari Rappoport, told New Scientist magazine.
The main use for the algorithm will be for marketers who want to keep track of what online reviewers are writing about their products. But hopefully the scientists will also make an application for mobile devices that people like me — non-Israelis living in Israel — can give to friends to use when talking to us. Whenever they’re unsure if we’re being serious, they can just type in what we said.
So how big an innovation is this? In the New Scientist article, Lillian Lee, a natural language processing expert at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., described the new technology as “very exciting.”
Was she being serious?
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
