Twelve Humorous Songs

Quantifying Humorous Lexical Incongruity

Opinion: What makes things humorous.

In a familiar parable, a group of blind men try to discern the shape of an elephant, but each man’s perspective differs depending on whether he’s touching the trunk, tusk, or tail (Fig. 1). After 2,500 years of studying humor, scientists similarly have differing perspectives on what makes things funny (1). We present three common perspectives on humor. Although each is insightful, no one perspe...

Evaluating humorous properties of texts

The success of a humour-generation program is usually assessed by having human judges rate texts. However, there has been little consideration of the patterns shown by such judgements, particularly in terms of consistency. We present two small studies which attempt to gauge the consistency of human judgements about humorous aspects of texts, and discuss some of the methodological issues involved.

Observations on Humorous Act Construction

We discuss the generation of humorous acts by embodied agents. How can a humorous act be constructed from the discourse and when should it be displayed? Rather than introducing algorithms for humorous act production we discuss the issues that are involved. From our observations it becomes clear that current research on affective computing, research on generating and interpreting facial expressi...

Toward Computational Recognition of Humorous Intent

Recognizing the intent of a written utterance is a difficult task. To understand the intended meanings, it may be necessary to recognize all possible meanings of the utterance; and, then choose the most appropriate one for the situation. The choice may be made using heuristics. A method for recognition of a humorous intent in a text is proposed. Computational recognition of a humorous intent ca...