Researchers at the University of Groningen’s speech technology lab in the Netherlands have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can detect sarcasm. This breakthrough could help AI interact with people more naturally, as sarcasm is a common part of human communication.
The researchers obtained their information from training a neural network on text, audio, and emotional content from popular sitcoms like Friends and The Big Bang Theory. They used a database called Mustard, which contains scenes from these shows annotated with labels indicating sarcasm.
The AI system was trained on examples such as Leonard’s futile attempt to escape a locked room in The Big Bang Theory, prompting Sheldon’s sarcastic remark: “It’s just a privilege to watch your mind at work.” After training on the text, audio, and emotional scores, the AI could detect sarcasm in unlabeled exchanges from the sitcoms with nearly 75% accuracy.
According to researcher Matt Coler, sarcasm is more prevalent in our discourse than we might realize, so understanding it is crucial for seamless human-machine communication. Currently, we have to speak to our devices in a very literal way, but with this technology, we could converse more naturally.
Shekhar Nayak, another researcher on the project, suggested that the same approach could be used to detect negative tone in language and identify abuse and hate speech.
While the researchers acknowledge that even humans cannot achieve 100% accuracy in detecting sarcasm, they aim to improve the AI’s performance by incorporating visual cues like eyebrow movements and smirks into the training data.
Overall, this research could lead to more natural and fluid conversations between humans and AI assistants, as well as better detection of negative language online.
Source: The information in this rewrite was obtained from the article “Researchers build AI-driven sarcasm detector” published by Ian Sample in The Guardian on May 16, 2024. You can check out the full article here.
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