Never mind that it can pass the bar exam, ace medical tests and read bedtime stories with emotion, artificial intelligence will never match the marvel of the human mind without first mastering the art of sarcasm.
There is more to the project than teaching algorithms that sometimes even the most effusive comments cannot be taken literally and must, instead, be interpreted as the diametric opposite. Sarcasm permeates our discourse more than we might appreciate, Coler said, so understanding it is crucial if humans and machines are to communicate seamlessly.
In work presented at a joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and the Canadian Acoustical Association in Ottawa on Thursday, Xiyuan Gao, a PhD student at the lab, described how the group trained a neural network on text, audio and emotional content of video clips from US sitcoms including Friends and The Big Bang Theory. The database,