The Race For AI: Interpreting Sarcasm with Sentiment Based Machine Translation

https://www.meetup.com/artificial-intelligence-il/events/244304476/

Agenda:

18:00-18:30: Gathering (food and drinks)

18:30 –20:00- "The Race For AI: Interpreting Sarcasm with Sentiment Based Machine Translation"

By Lotem Peled from Gong.io

Talk abstract:

Sarcasm is defined as the use of words that mean the opposite of what one would really want to say in order to insult someone, to show irritation, or to be funny. In other words, "Sarcasm – the giant chasm between what I say, and the idiot who doesn’t get it". From Facebook and Twitter to IMDB and Amazon reviews, sarcasm is frequently found in the opinionated user-generated content, posing a challenge both to human readers and to NLP algorithms (such as sentiment analysis).

Machines can nowadays identify sarcastic expressions, but other than identifying the sarcasm, can they actually understand and interpret it? In this talk, I will present my research on the novel task of sarcasm interpretation, along with its motivations and challenges. I will present a parallel corpus of sarcastic tweets and their non-sarcastic interpretations constructed for this task and introduce the Sarcasm SIGN – a machine translation based sarcasm interpretation algorithm that puts a special emphasis on sentiment words.

I will conclude with a discussion on how to evaluate the quality of generated sarcasm interpretations, and present directions for future research on this new task.

Speaker bio:

Lotem Peled is a data scientist and NLP researcher at Gong.io, with an MSc in Natural Language Processing from the Technion. Working at Gong.io Lotem specializes in neural language modeling, while her academic research focuses on the task of sarcasm interpretation, its evaluation, and applications in multiple domains. Lotem's latest work, presenting a novel system for sarcasm interpretation, has been presented in ACL 2017, the world's leading NLP venue.