Negative Double Positive

language

An MIT linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn't a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative."

A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."

This has been discussed on the Linguistics Stack Exchange: Is "double positive meaning negative" a common phenomenon?

Yes, for example, it's the same in Italian "sì, sì" (= yes, yes), but it's ambiguous, it depends on intonation and not on the words themselves; this means that "double positive = negative" is wrong speaking about the words, but it works through other means. Changing intonation, that "sì, sì" can be absolutely positive as well. We also use a small variation in written language to substitute the intonation. We write "seh seh" or "se se"... More or less like the English slang variation "ye ye".

In Hebrew, my native language, we have "כן, בטח" (ken, betach — "yes, sure"). With the right intonation, it flips to pure sarcasm. Same with "כן, כן" (ken, ken — "yes, yes"). Can be genuine agreement or complete dismissal.

Related, from The Lousy Linguist:

There are 3 interpretations of "yeah, right" in American English:
  1. Normal (factual agreement): yeah right = 'yes, that is correct'
  2. Sarcastic (opposite meaning): yeah right = 'no way in hell'
  3. Back-channel (sentiment agreement): yeah right = 'mm-hmm'

Thanks to the influence of Seinfeld and Friends throughout the 90s, Sarcastic is probably the default use these days...

The Lousy Linguist links to a 2006 paper from USC that tried to teach a computer to detect sarcastic "yeah right" in phone conversations. Their finding: when human annotators listened without context, they only agreed 52% of the time. Barely above chance. Add context, and agreement jumps to 77%. The machine did best when it ignored tone of voice entirely and focused on contextual cues like laughter and position in the conversation. How something is said matters less than what surrounds it.

At work we're trying to detect intent from text. No audio. No laughter. Just words. Sarcasm is especially confusing: "yeah, sure, I'll buy this camera tomorrow!" means one thing as a reply to Canon posting about the new EOS 600D, and something else entirely when it's a comment on an article about the $120,000 EF 1200mm f/5.6.

I wonder how long until computers actually get this right.