AI Can Detect Sarcasm With Help From ‘Friends’?—Yeah, Right!

In a breakthrough that could potentially save marriages, friendships, and countless misunderstandings, scientists say they have built an AI-powered sarcasm detection tool.A group of researchers from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands claim they have developed an AI system that can tell whether you’re being straight and serious, or deploying some sly, humorous wit.Their work was presented today at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Ottawa, and combines text and voice analysis. The team is led by graduate student Xiyuan Gao, who has been “tackling the challenge of figurative language” as part of her academic research.Gao didn’t immediately respond to a request for comments by Decrypt.A research paper outlines the team’s approach to sarcasm detection.First, they trained a neural network on multi-modal data—audio clips, transcribed text, and annotated emotional content—from sarcasm-laden scenes in sitcoms like “Friends” and “The Big Bang Theory” obtained from the MUStARD database.They next developed an algorithm to map emotional cues from the audio and text, and assigned appropriate emoticons based on sentiment analysis. This made the AI more powerful at detecting sarcasm based on a multi-faceted approach, beating other tools that rely on text and voice pitch changes alone.”Our methodology leverages the strengths of each modality: emotion recognition algorithms analyze the audio data for affective cues, while sentiment analysis processes the text,” the research paper explains. “The integration of these modalities aims to compensate for limitations in pitch perception.”The AI detected sarcasm in new sitcom scenes with around 75% accuracy. The researchers admit, however, humans still edge out machines in this particular perception test.”When you start studying sarcasm, you become hyper-aware of the extent to which we use it as part of our normal mode of communication,” Matt Coler, another researcher working on the project, told The Guardian. “We have to speak to our devices in a very literal way, as if we’re talking to a robot, because we are.“It doesn’t have to be this way,” he added.This sarcasm detection tool is only the latest attempt to find the hidden sentiment or meaning in human language, and is becoming increasingly important as the explosive adoption of AI chatbots means millions of daily conversations with large language models (LLM).For example, Hume AI says it developed an AI system to detect different inflections in the voice to identify a range of emotions, not just a change in tone or mood.Hume is designed to understand and respond to human emotions in a more nuanced and empathetic way, making AI interactions more natural and engaging, the company explains.Meanwhile, a team from the Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences and the University of Oulu in Finland published a research paper last month exploring contactless techniques in multimodal emotion recognition.The team similarly found that the most accurate way to analyze emotions is by merging visual, audio, and text cues together. However, they emphasized that this type of understanding is still limited by cultural variables, inherent model biases, misinterpretations, and the lack of understanding of past context.Other researchers have tried to analyze the use of emojis to properly detect the emotional state of the people using them. After all, a text message followed by a winking face emoji can have a very different meaning than a one without the illustration, or with a different emoji.While the capability to adapt to richer nuance in conversations will help AI chatbots better answer prompts from humans, it could have far-reaching implications for society in general. In addition to detecting unwritten negative tone in language or identifying hate speech, it could also smooth interpersonal relationships, providing greater clarity in moments of confusion—especially for people communicating across languages or with neurodivergent conditions.Edited by Ryan Ozawa.