Lost in Happy Land: Sarcasm Detection & Its Obstacles and Challenges

Marge: Well, Homer, maybe you can take some consolation in the fact that something you created is making so many people happy.
Homer: Oh, look at me! I'm making people happy! I'm the Magical Man, from Happy Land, in a gumdrop house on Lollipop Laaaaane! [leaves, slamming the door, then pokes his head back in] Oh, by the way, I was being sarcastic. [slams door]
Marge: Well, duh.
The Simpsons: Season 3, Episode 10 ("Flaming Moe's")

In a 2011 retrospective review of the "Flaming Moe's" episode of The Simpsons, The A.V. Club's head writer, Nathan Rabin, calls this "glorious orgy of bitter sarcasm" in which "Homer frolics about in a mincing, fanciful burlesque of manic happiness" one of his favorite sequences in the history of the show. "I imagine that if you were to ask people, especially of my generation (I'm 35), what springs to mind when they think about sarcasm, that intricately worded, beautifully acted sequence would be a popular answer," Rabin writes. "It's the perfect distillation of sarcasm at its most basic."

Watch or listen to Homer's angry tantrum, and it's difficult to imagine anyone needing its door-popping postscript in order to understand his sarcastic intent. Yet even though sarcasm's detractors dismiss it as an obvious form of humor, numerous scientific studies have found that sarcasm is remarkably complex, and that the ability to detect sarcastic intent depends upon age, social acumen, language, and an intricate network of brain processing that even the most advanced computer algorithms are unable to fully replicate.

Well, duh.

Cynical Children

Contemporary culture tends toward a schizophrenic treatment of children, both idealizing their innocence and exploiting their credulity via advertising. Perhaps that's one adaptive reason why a child's ability to grasp sarcasm coincides with the natural development of cynicism. Or as a 2005 ABC story put it: "Cynicism Starts Young and Sarcasm Is Complex."

As ABC reported, Candace Mills, a Yale University graduate student, conducted a study of schoolchildren aged 6 to 12 to determine how trusting they are when processing information. She found that the children fell into two groups: children younger than eight were very gullible, and children eight to 12 were surprisingly cynical. The children were told stories of close competitions that characters claimed to have won. The eight-to-12-year-olds didn't just doubt the victory claims: they said the characters were lying.

"Given that children are exposed to so much, it's good to know when they may be more cynical," Mills told ABC. Her conclusion: the study demonstrates how cynicism is a key part of human behavior.

Mills' study of children's awareness of underlying intentions is particularly interesting when juxtaposed with a 2003 study by University of Calgary psychologist Penny Pexman. In their research, Pexman and a colleague sought to discover if children could perceive the humorous intent of sarcasm. Different puppet play scenarios containing "counter-factual communication" were presented to 64 children. For example, in one play an incompetent puppet gardener pulled out all the flowers and left the "yucky" weeds, causing the puppet homeowner to say, "You're a great gardener." Half of the children under age 10 took the statement literally.

"Even though the intonation is there and the gardener totally messed up, they really do think it's a positive remark," Pexman said. Throughout the study, children under 10 "almost always" took sarcastic remarks seriously. "Our study suggests that five-year-olds are beginning to understand the simplest form of sarcasm and are getting better at it, but still by the age of eight they really don't find it funny, so there's still a dissociation there."

In another study, "Development of children's ability to distinguish sarcasm and verbal irony," published by Cambridge University Press in Journal of Child Language in 2010, Pexman and Melanie Glenwright of the University of Manitoba presented sarcastic and ironic "speech acts" to 71 five-to-six-year-olds and 71 nine-to-ten-year-olds. "Five- to six-year-olds were beginning to understand the non-literal meanings of sarcastic speakers and ironic speakers but did not distinguish ironic and sarcastic speakers' intentions. Nine- to ten-year-olds were more accurate at understanding sarcastic and ironic speakers and they distinguished these speakers' intentions, rating sarcastic criticisms as more 'mean' than ironic criticisms," Pexman and Glenwright wrote.

The Sarcastic Mind

In recent years, neuroscientists and neuropsychologists have discovered both the precise location where sarcasm detection occurs in the brain, and the complex processing network involved in that detection.

In 2008, Katherine Rankin of the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco, used an MRI machine to monitor the brain activity of people undergoing the Awareness of Social Inference Test, or Tasit, a clinical test developed in 2002 for assessing social perception after traumatic brain injury. The Tasit uses videotaped dialogue in which words that would appear literal on paper are given an extremely obvious sarcastic spin-obvious, at least, to anyone with a properly functioning right parahippocampal gyrus, as Rankin discovered.

The social acumen required to detect sarcasm or irony is lost in the early stages of frontotemporal dementia, the condition afflicting all of the patients involved in Rankin's study. Rankin's pre-study expectation was that the MRI scans would reveal problems in the left hemisphere of the brain, which deals with language and social interaction. Instead it was the right hemisphere, which detects visual context, that failed to perform normally.

"The right parahippocampal gyrus must be involved in detecting more than just visual context - it perceives social context as well," Rankin told The New York Times. At the annual American Academy of Neurology meeting in 2008, Rankin was asked if healthy brain differences could also play a role in the ability to detect sarcasm.

"We all have strengths and weaknesses in our cognitive abilities, including our ability to detect social cues," she said. "There may be volume-based differences in certain regions that explain variations in all sorts of cognitive abilities."

As ABC reported in 2003, sarcasm detection is also dependent upon an involved series of neural networks. The sarcasm detection process begins with an interpretation of literal meaning by the language processors in the left side of the brain. Then the frontal lobes and right hemisphere work out the social, emotional, and intentional context. These two meanings-literal and contextual-are then integrated by the right ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

Simone Shamay-Tsoory, director of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Lab, along with her colleagues at the University of Haifa in Israel, conducted a study of people who had lesions in the various regions of the brain that are involved in interpreting sarcastic comments, and correlated the lesion locations with the elements of sarcasm that baffled them.

"The frontal lobes act together with the right hemisphere that interprets emotions," Shamay-Tsoory told ABC. "This is one example of how a brain lesion can impair important faculties in the brain."

Sarcasm Detection: The Business of the Future?

A career in comedy may currently be the best way to benefit from a well-developed sense of sarcasm, but advances in communication technology may soon turn sarcasm detection into a profitable enterprise.

But not just yet-sarcasm detection is still too complicated for even the most advanced computer algorithms. However, in 2010 a team of researchers from Hebrew University of Jerusalem made the greatest advance to date in computerized sarcasm detection. As The Jerusalem Post reported, "Over a dozen teams around the world have been trying to detect sarcasm - or verbal irony - in text for years, but only the HU researchers have succeeded."

In June 2010, the HU researchers presented their research findings at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference in Washington. Using patent-pending algorithms, the HU team had applied a process known as SASI (Semi-supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification) to a data set of 66,000 Amazon.com reviews.

"Using a gold standard in which each sentence was tagged by three annotators, we obtained precision of 77% and recall of 83.1% for identifying sarcastic sentences," the researchers said in their presentation paper. "We found some strong features that characterize sarcastic utterances. However, a combination of more subtle pattern-based features proved more promising in identifying the various facets of sarcasm."

Sounds like a useless invention? Not in an age when information is both power and money. As the Post said, "The use of this technology might seem esoteric to many, but detecting sarcasm has many commercial applications, including the assessment of reviews on the Internet of products and services such as restaurants, hotels and books, as well as of opinions on a variety of subjects, from political to personal. As opinions on Internet sites are increasingly used for 'opinion mining,' the HU computer researchers suggested that the use of sarcasm could mislead, by giving different or opposite views than the understood meaning."

But don't worry that Skynet will soon be unleashing an army of sarcasm-detecting polyglot Terminators. The HU team tested its algorithms in English, German, and Chinese. Arabic and Hebrew were too complicated, in part because of the difference between their written and spoken languages and the potential for a multiplicity of meanings.