Didn’t get the jibe? This program by IITB researchers could help you

It is a challenging form of sentiment. While sarcasm means ridiculing or mocking someone, it often has positive words. ADITYA JOSHI, researcher

MUMBAI :“Excellent service”, an Indian flier posted recently on the Twitter handle of an airline that had sent her luggage to a different city. “Thank you for flying with us,” the airline responded promptly. Sarcasm has become a popular tool of ridicule on social media, but the algorithms that analyse or respond to users are still not equipped to understand it. Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B) found that 11% of the content shared in the short text space — on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook — is sarcastic, and, while there are algorithms that help social media managers detect sentiments in texts, ordinary programs fail to detect sarcasm 50% of the time.

To catch this glitch, IIT-B and Iitb-monash University researchers are training artificial intelligence to detect and generate sarcastic comments.

“Sarcasm is an attack in disguise,” said Pushpak Bhattacharyya, a professor at the institute’s computer science and engineering department.

“Using only a negative statement to express opinion about a bad service is not as intense or hurtful as a sarcastic statement.”

Sarcasm comprises both positive and negative words, the researchers said.

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