A Sense of Humor is Especially Important During Difficult Times

Running head: SENSE OF HUMOR Sense of Humor

Prediction Is Very Difficult, Especially About the Future.

I am writing this column in early December, prior to the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) in Florence, but after the IEEE Technical Activity Board (TAB) meeting in New Jersey and the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) Executive Committee meeting that was held in Stutt-gart. Amid all this travel, I have been contemplating reoccurring themes at the TAB and CSS meetings, both this yea...

It Is Difficult to Make Predictions, Especially About the Future.

See related article, p XXX Physicists, politicians, poets, and punters understand the pitfalls of predicting the future. Similarly, predicting outcomes after stroke rehabilitation can be difficult when based on clinical impression, and several approaches to combining key variables in predictive models have been developed. In this issue, Scrutinio et al introduce a predictive model of functional...

#HashtagWars: Learning a Sense of Humor

In this work, we present a new dataset for computational humor, specifically comparative humor ranking, which attempts to eschew the ubiquitous binary approach to humor detection. The dataset consists of tweets that are humorous responses to a given hashtag. We describe the motivation for this new dataset, as well as the collection process, which includes a description of our semi-automated sys...

When Is Word Sense Disambiguation Difficult? A Crowdsourcing Approach

We identified features that drive differential accuracy in word sense disambiguation (WSD) by building regression models using 10,000 coarse-grained WSD instances which were labeled on Mturk. Features predictive of accuracy include properties of the target word (word frequency, part of speech, and number of possible senses), the example context (length), and the Turker’s engagement with our tas...