From Popular Mechanics
Teaching Siri to Snark: Why humans can understand sarcasm, and robots can't (yet)
By Brandon Ambrosino
Siri is not good with sarcasm.
Maybe once you've sassed back at Apple's virtual assistant after a particularly unhelpful answer only for her to sincerely say, "My Pleasure. As Always." Once in a while you might get a spark of snark — for example, ask her what the film Inception is about. But those quips are simply Easter eggs—pre-programmed responses to voice cues....
"Sarcasm detection is a good example of what we call AI-complete," says David Bamman, assistant professor in the School of Information at UC Berkeley. It requires knowledge of the entire world, including current events, the general attitude of the speaker, and the relationship between the speaker and listener. The need for so much information makes it difficult to "code" sarcasm....
