This is, at least from my point of view, an important development for robotics reported in the New Scientist.
Programmers have now managed to write “sentiment-analysing” software that has been trained, through collating a bank of comments judged by human readers to contain sarcastic content, to recognise sarcasm. For some reason I find it amusing that the comments were taken from Amazon.com product reviews, as well as from Twitter.
I would assume that adding this ability, to analyse the contents of a statement for sarcastic components, to the existing ability of some robots to read tones of voice, might bring us a step closer to building robot companions that can take part in life more fully by appreciating all of the joys of human(like) existence. After all, without an understanding of sarcasm how could we expect robots to understand comedy. “You know in another life, maybe we could have been brothers…” (Black Books)
