Iâd like to note the full bullet is âAbility to detect sarcasm and false positives.â
If someone knows what a false positive is, they ought to know that designing a system to detect them is exactly the same thing as simple always getting everything right. Itâs also literally impossible. Like, literally, literally. Obviously and provably outside the bounds of reality.
A sufficiently advanced computer may be able to detect sarcasm on the internet, but this specification is actually asking for fairy dust.
Sure, but how will it do with irony?
I read the âdetect ⌠false positivesâ as just a bit of sarcasm. Maybe I missed a false positive.
Itâs just an RFP. Theyâre not âdevelopingâ anything, just asking for it. I donât see the harm in that. They want something that matches that spec (wouldnât you?) and theyâre telling the world they want it.
They wonât get it of course, because it doesnât exist. But maybe theyâll get parts of it, or maybe it will spur research. Worst case, they get bogus proposals and donât have anyone realize theyâre bogus.
Ohhh, a SARCASM detector, well thatâs a REAL useful invention!
Thing is, it is possible. Disclaimer is that I have studied speech and language recognition but Iâm nowhere near an expert. Iâve worked on some NLP projects. With sarcasm, irony, and all the rest, you could n-gram typical patterns of words, and with a fair cross-section of human testers, you could verify a set of sarcastic/ironic patterns, and record the differences in inflection in the spoken words. There must be differences in the physical sounds, as well as contextual clues and outright word choice. If there were no distinguishing differences between sarcasm, irony and straight-up regular speech, then we couldnât detect them as people. Now Iâll freely admit that messages are sometimes hard to receive. So there of course would be error. Maybe they just want to be able to skim off the top layer to reduce their level of hassle - they just want to be able to quickly put into bins all the tweets of someone saying they wanna do such-and-such to you-know-who and take an educated guess if the person could be serious about it. That IS firmly in the realm of possibility.
Yeah, like I said, I figure a sufficiently advanced system could presumably detect sarcasm. Detecting âfalse positivesâ is nonsense from someone who thinks âfalse positiveâ is a buzz word and not a meaningful term.
Although I notice that on the internet human beings arenât very good at detecting sarcasm either. I think sarcasm in print would be very tough.
An RFP means they are developing it. When they get the proposals back they are pretty much obligated to choose the one that best matches your criteria unless none of them can meet criteria they deemed essential. Companies will put in bids, one of them will win, and whoever wins will be at the end of the money funnel while they produce something that doesnât really work.
I would neeeeeeeeeeeeeever dream of counterfeiting money
This is exactly right. They may or may not have money sitting in a fund. Doesnât matter. Typically they will grab from another budget item somewhere and throw money at a good proposal. Good proposal being defined as my cronies put this thing together at Raytheon and need 250k for the first year and then 600k per year thereafter for it. That kind of âgood proposal.â Iâve submitted dozens of these things with a colleague, and occasionally they do fund a little guy⌠Not like they fund their friends, though.
Thing is, youâd need to get sarcastic people to admit their covert aggression, which is difficult even when theyâre aware of it.
That certainly is a nice shirt youâre wearing. Iâd hate to see it get messed up.
You want to come to my dogs birthday party? 
We donât really need a sarcasm detector. But a bot that closed our sarcasm tags for us would probably be a huge leap forward.
Sure, Iâll bring my five little friends. A bot that prevented anyone from posting anything would be fantastic as well.
Hopefully better than a certain Canadian songstress.
I hope it also detects the incorrect use of âliteralâ and âironicâ.
Iâm plenty jaded about RFPs generally and gubmint RFPs specifically, but it is very normal to set out an RFP asking for an unreachable platonic ideal in order to spur competition in reaching partway to that ideal.
If itâs the Secret Serviceâs job to watch for, e.g., political assassination threats on Twitter, and if they already have some NLP system scanning the stream of all public tweets looking for those threats, then it makes good sense for them to cull the list of reported threats based on an NLP-backed diagnosis of âsarcasmâ or âunseriousnessâ or whatever.
Iâm actually fine with this RFP, at least in concept. I would be pissed if it looked like they were trying to do a better job of surveilling my private communications; it looks like they are actually trying to do a better job of NOT dragnetting people who make a threatening-looking statement in jest, on public fora.
I could be wrong, of course.
I think we must be misinterpreting this â Iâm assuming that âdetects false positivesâ is domain-specific jargon in this case.
I donât think they are asking for a system that both detects sarcasm in peopleâs IM messages, and detects false-positives in, say, medical experiments. Such a spec would be akin to asking for a program that detects spam-messages and guides ICBMs at the same time.
Note: Iâm reading the spec literally as Ability to detect sarcasm âandâ false positives. If it were Ability to detect sarcasm âwithoutâ false positives that would be an entirely different thing â and one solvable by simple outputting ânot sarcasm!â each timeâŚ
Note #2: you may already know what they mean by âfalse positivesâ in this case and maybe itâs only me who doesnât.
I guess the issue is I canât imagine anything they could mean by âfalse positivesâ that would make asking for that make sense. System A can possibly detect false positives in System B but A will have itâs own false positives, so there isnât much point.
I realize that what they want is something that will detect peopleâs attitudes so they can find people who are violent or hostile or whatever and for the system to minimize the number of false positives it gives. But we all want every test we conduct to have an absolute minimum of incorrect results. It just really reads to me like it was written by someone who doesnât know what they are asking for, and thatâs both troublesome and half-expected.
HLDT: Hodgman Literary Tone Detector
[http://youtu.be/2wdV7Wmv6wk][1]
If you require a device the inserts electricity into your brain via a thin wire.
