Will AI ever ‘understand’ satire? Posted on : Nov 09 - 2019

Machines don't understand much of anything, especially not things such as ironic speech, but machine learning may be able to assist humanity in some way by counting the instances of linguistic and semantic constructions that indicate satire or misleading news, according to a new study by tech startup AdVerifai, in partnership with George Washington University and Amazon’s AWS.

A lot of nuances of writing are lost on the internet -- things such as irony.

That's why satirical material such as the writing of Andy Borowitz on the website of The New Yorker magazine has to be labeled as satire, to make sure we know. 

Scientists in recent years have become concerned: What about writing that isn't properly understood, such as satire mistaken for the truth, or, conversely, deliberate disinformation campaigns that are disguised as innocent satire?

And so began a quest to divine some form of machine learning technology that could automatically identify satire as such and distinguish it from deliberate lies.

In truth, a machine can't understand much of anything, really, and it certainly can't understand satire. But it may be able to quantify aspects of satirical writing, which might help to deal with the flood of fake news on the Internet.

Case in point: A paper presented this week at the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, in Hong Kong, authored by researchers from the tech startup AdVerifai, The George Washington University in Washington, DC, and Amazon's AWS cloud division.

The paper, Identifying Nuances in Fake News vs. Satire: Using Semantic and Linguistic Cues, builds upon years of work modeling differences between misleading, factually inaccurate news articles, on the one hand, and satire on the other hand. (There's also a slide deck prepared for EMNLP.)

The pressing concern, as lead author Or Levi, of AdVerifai, and his colleagues, write, is that it can be difficult in practice to tell satire from fake news. That means legitimate satire can get banned while misleading information may get undeserved attention because it masquerades as satire.

"For users, incorrectly classifying satire as fake news may deprive them from desirable entertainment content, while identifying a fake news story as legitimate satire may expose them to misinformation," is how Levi and colleagues describe the situation.

The idea of all this research is that, although a person should know satire given a modicum of sense and topical knowledge, society may need to more precisely articulate and measure the aspects of satirical writing in a machine-readable fashion. View More