nlp - Can an algorithm detect sarcasm

Question

(Closed.) This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers. question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14097388/can-an-algorithm-detect-sarcasm

Answer 1

Looks like there are studies that attempted just that, but they have yet to come up with a well working algorithm.

From González-Ibá?ez, R. et al. "Identifying sarcasm in Twitter: a closer look"

Sarcasm and irony are well-studied phenomena in linguistics, psychology and cognitive science[...]. But in the text mining literature, automatic detection of sarcasm is considered a difficult problem [...] and has been addressed in only a few studies. [...] The work most closely related to ours is that of Davidov et al. (2010), whose objective was to identify sarcastic and non-sarcastic utterances in Twitter and in Amazon product reviews. In this paper, we consider the somewhat harder problem of distinguishing sarcastic tweets from non- sarcastic tweets

They conclude:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, neither the human judges nor the machine learning techniques perform very well. [...] Our results suggest that lexical features alone are not sufficient for identifying sarcasm and that pragmatic and contextual features merit further study

Here is another recent, relevant paper:
Reyes, A. "From humor recognition to irony detection: The ?gurative language of social media"