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U.S. Researchers Develop AI That Can Detect Sarcasm in Social Media

Social media has become a dominant form of communication for individuals and for companies looking to market and sell their products and services. Properly understanding and responding to customer ON social media platforms is critical for success, but it is incredibly labour intensive. Hence, U.S. Computer science researchers have developed a technique that accurately detects sarcasm in a social media text. The team’s findings were recently published in the journal Entropy.

The team effectively taught the computer model to find patterns that often indicate sarcasm and combined that with teaching the program to correctly pick out cue words in sequences that were more likely to indicate sarcasm. They taught the model to do this by feeding it large data sets and then checked its accuracy.

Sarcasm has been a major hurdle to increasing the accuracy of sentiment analysis, especially on social media, since sarcasm relies heavily on vocal tones, facial expressions and gestures that cannot be represented in the text. Recognising sarcasm in textual online communication is no easy task as none of these cues are readily available.

The researchers proposed an approach consists of five components: Data Pre-Processing, Multi-Head Self-Attention, Gated Recurrent Units (GRU), Classification, and Model Interpretability. Data pre-processing involves converting input text to word embeddings, which is required for training a deep learning model. To this end, they first apply a standard tokeniser to convert a sentence to a sequence of tokens, then we employ pre-trained language models to convert the tokens to word embeddings.

These embeddings form the input to our multi-head self-attention module, which identifies words in the input text that provide crucial cues for sarcasm. In the next step, the GRU layer aids in learning long-distance relationships among these highlighted words and output a single feature vector that encodes the entire sequence. Finally, a fully connected layer with sigmoid activation is used to obtain the final classification score.

The researchers show the effectiveness of the approach by achieving state-of-the-art results on multiple datasets from social networking platforms and online media. Models trained using our proposed approach are easily interpretable and enable identifying sarcastic cues in the input text which contribute to the final classification score. They visualise the learned attention weights on a few sample input texts to showcase the effectiveness and interpretability of their model.

As reported by OpenGov Asia, other U.S. researchers have also developed an AI tool, called CitizenHelper to provide insights into online behaviour. This tool can sort through millions of tweets to identify behaviours that could assist emergency agencies and give them an understanding of the population’s attitudes.

The U.S. researchers specifically use this tool to gain insight into people’s response to COVID-19 in the Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia (DMV) area. The tool uses artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to filter the posts and then determine the relevance and information level of each tweet.

The head of the research team says that he and his team are extracting intelligence from social media posts on several key subjects. They include risks, symptoms, compliance with social distancing, and more relevant information on COVID-19 using a human-artificial intelligence (AI) teaming approach.

The tool helps these CERTs to scale work that would be difficult for humans to do alone. The head of the research team says that humans are good at contextual understanding to filter content but they cannot scale. Machines, on the other hand, are good at scaling, but they do not deeply understand the context very well. Hence, a human-AI teaming approach is invaluable. The algorithms need humans to help them improve their accuracy. CitizenHelper allows this very seamless interactive mechanism for humans and computers. The humans can provide feedback to the machine on what the machine has predicted.

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Qlik’s vision is a data-literate world, where everyone can use data and analytics to improve decision-making and solve their most challenging problems. A private company, Qlik offers real-time data integration and analytics solutions, powered by Qlik Cloud, to close the gaps between data, insights and action. By transforming data into Active Intelligence, businesses can drive better decisions, improve revenue and profitability, and optimize customer relationships. Qlik serves more than 38,000 active customers in over 100 countries.

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CTC Global Singapore, a premier end-to-end IT solutions provider, is a fully owned subsidiary of ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (CTC) and ITOCHU Corporation.

Since 1972, CTC has established itself as one of the country’s top IT solutions providers. With 50 years of experience, headed by an experienced management team and staffed by over 200 qualified IT professionals, we support organizations with integrated IT solutions expertise in Autonomous IT, Cyber Security, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Cloud Infrastructure, Workplace Modernization and Professional Services.

Well-known for our strengths in system integration and consultation, CTC Global proves to be the preferred IT outsourcing destination for organizations all over Singapore today.

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Planview has one mission: to build the future of connected work. Our solutions enable organizations to connect the business from ideas to impact, empowering companies to accelerate the achievement of what matters most. Planview’s full spectrum of Portfolio Management and Work Management solutions creates an organizational focus on the strategic outcomes that matter and empowers teams to deliver their best work, no matter how they work. The comprehensive Planview platform and enterprise success model enables customers to deliver innovative, competitive products, services, and customer experiences. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, with locations around the world, Planview has more than 1,300 employees supporting 4,500 customers and 2.6 million users worldwide. For more information, visit www.planview.com.

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SIRIM is a premier industrial research and technology organisation in Malaysia, wholly-owned by the Minister​ of Finance Incorporated. With over forty years of experience and expertise, SIRIM is mandated as the machinery for research and technology development, and the national champion of quality. SIRIM has always played a major role in the development of the country’s private sector. By tapping into our expertise and knowledge base, we focus on developing new technologies and improvements in the manufacturing, technology and services sectors. We nurture Small Medium Enterprises (SME) growth with solutions for technology penetration and upgrading, making it an ideal technology partner for SMEs.

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HashiCorp provides infrastructure automation software for multi-cloud environments, enabling enterprises to unlock a common cloud operating model to provision, secure, connect, and run any application on any infrastructure. HashiCorp tools allow organizations to deliver applications faster by helping enterprises transition from manual processes and ITIL practices to self-service automation and DevOps practices. 

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IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider. We help clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Nearly 3,000 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely. IBM’s breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM’s legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity and service.

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