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"There are a lot of systems designed to identify sarcasm, but this is the first that is able to interpret sarcasm in written text," said Peled. "We hope in the future, it will help people with autism and Asperger's, who have difficulty interpreting sarcasm, irony and humor." Based on machine translation, the new system turns sarcasti c sentences into honest (non-sarcastic) ones. It will, for example, turn a sarcastic sentence such as, "The new 'Fast and Furious' movie is awesome. #sarcasm" into the honest sentence, "The new Fast and Furious movie is terrible." Despite the vast development in this field, and the successes of sentiment analysis applications on "social media intelligence," existing applications do not know how to interpret sarcasm, where the writer writes the opposite of what (s)he actually means. In order to teach the system to produce accurate interpretations, the researchers compiled a database of 3...

Researchers tested 535 children and adults with Tourette's for autism, using a self-reporting test called the Social Responsiveness Scale. Among the 294 children tested , 22.8 percent reached the cutoff for autism, versus 8.7 percent of the 241 adults. In contrast, autism is estimated to affect between 0.3 and 2.9 percent of the general population, according to studies cited in the paper. The Social Responsiveness Scale Second Edition is a 65-item quantitative measure of autism symptoms that assesses the ability to engage in "emotionally appropriate reciprocal social interactions." It evaluates levels of social awareness, social cognition, social communication, social motivation, and restrictive interests and repetitive behavior. Its threshold for autism compares favorably with the diagnostic gold standard, the Autism Diagnostic Interview, the researchers noted. The study is publishing on June 22, 2017, in the  Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescen...

"Autism, like most human diseases, is complex," said Scott B . Selleck, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State and one of the leaders of the research team. "There are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of genes involved and up until now -- with very few exceptions -- these have been studied independently of the environmental contributors to autism, which are real. Our team of researchers represents a merger of people with genetic expertise and environmental epidemiologists, allowing us for the first time to answer questions about how genetic and environmental risk factors for autism interact." The team looked at copy-number variation -- deletions and duplications of repeated elements in the genome that lead to variation among individuals in the number of repeated elements -- as a general measure of genetic variation and five types of air pollution -- traffic-related air pollution, nitrogen oxides, two sizes of particulate matter, and ozo...