Israeli boffins have come up with computer software that can detect sarcasm.

SASI, a Semi-supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification, can recognize sarcastic sentences in product reviews online with pretty astounding 77 percent precision. Apparently the team scanned 66,000 Amazon.com product reviews, with three different human annotators tagging sentences for sarcasm.

The team spotted sarcastic patterns that emerged in the reviews and created a classification algorithm that puts each statement into a sarcastic class. The algorithms were then trained on that seed set of 80 sentences from the collection of reviews. (If we ran it through your stuff, it would decompile itself after two paragraphs. sub.ed.)

Apparently the computer could guess that the person was joking more than 77 percent of the time. This was much better than your average Apple user which got it only 1.2 per cent of the time.