Saaarchasm

Saaarchasm is a marvelous app that detects sarcasm from text and generates an appropriate intonation to that text.

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Inspiration

One day a group of my friends were chatting and joking around over boba. One of my friends admits to laughing with us but does not understand certain... elements of these conversations. Namely, she could not understand any sarcastic comments. Saaarchasm is a place for people like her that may need a hint or two to not only confirm if a comment was sarcastic, but to hone the skills of using sarcasm to use for herself one day.

What it does

Using state of the art technology and current understandings of natural language processing and machine learning, my group has built a pretty capable app actually. The app is simple: it takes text, and classifies whether or not the text is sarcastic. It not only gives the text a label, but it also shows the user how confident it is in its judgement of the text being sarcastic and not sarcastic. Additionally, an audio clip is synthesized from the text, and the clip will have intonation to the speech if the text was classified to be sarcastic.

How I built it

Python, Flask, and free Google Cloud credit.

Challenges I ran into

Training the model to learn sarcasm was pretty hard. After all, if people like my friend cannot understand sarcasm, I imagine a computer would have a really tough time learning sarcasm.

What I learned

We typically only associate intonation with sarcasm. However, we built a model that learned sarcasm solely through random tweets that were broadcasted throughout the duration of this hackathon. In lieu with some results from our evaluation metrics, we concluded that there is actually a vocabulary for sarcasm. In our particular case, our model learned that many people on Twitter used the word "love" sarcastically.

What's next for Saaarchasm

It will be shipped to friends that need to learn sarcasm, and companies that could use a sarcasm detector in their machine learning models and recommender systems. Since Google's Text-to-Speech API came out about 1 week before the creation of Saaarchasm, we expect to integrate more of their technology into ours as time progresses :D.

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