Picking up on sarcasm online can be hard even for humans. For computers, its often a major headache. But now a machine learning system has learned to spot when you're being sarcastic just by reading your past tweets. Mining comments on social media is big business. Advertisers track our attitudes and moods, companies and governments follow public opinion. But people being sarcastic and saying the opposite of what they mean makes this tricky. So Silvio Amir at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, and his colleagues turned to machine learning. They trained the system to spot sarcasm on Twitter simply by looking at a user's tweets. The software builds up a rich enough picture of a person that it can deduce when they're being sarcastic, correctly interpreting tweets such as "ok thanks for being a great caring personl" and "@BernieSanders and obama doing a great job."
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