An Investigation into Computational Recognition of Children's Jokes

The purpose of this paper is to describe an investigation into an ontology-based computational recognition of children’s jokes. While humor has been studied for centuries, computational humor has received very little attention. This may in part be due to the difficulty of the task: at the very least, it requires formal methods for humor generation/recognition and ‘‘being able to produce/interpret natural language, being capable of subtle and flexible inferences, and having a vast store of knowledge about the real world.” [Ritchie, 2004] There are some humor generators (see Ritchie [2004] for a review) and a handful of humor recognizers. Yet, “If computers are ever going to communicate naturally and effectively with humans, they must be able to use humor.” [Binsted, 2006] We are interested in recognition, not generation of humor. Recognition of all verbally expressed humor is an overly broad task. To narrow the task, only jokes for young children are considered. The reduction of the domain size to young children’s jokes is expected to decrease the complexity and sophistication of the language to be analyzed. This in turn decreases the knowledge that needs to be captured for text interpretation. To further narrow the domain, only two-sentence-long jokes that are based on phonological ambiguity will be considered. The first sentence points to a typical situation, or a script; the second sentence provides a “reasonable” explanation or an answer to the first sentence by utilizing similar sounding words related to the described situation. The second sentence may or may not follow the same situation as the first sentence. If it does not, a different situation or script is found to accommodate the explanation. According to Script-based Semantic Theory of Humor (SSTH) [Raskin, 1985], a text is a joke if it is fully or partially compatible with two scripts that overlap and oppose. In the subset of jokes that has been chosen for this project, the first sentence provides the first script. The second sentence usually contains an utterance that is incompatible with the first script. A word (or utterance) that sounds similar to a word in the second sentence, together with the rest of the words of the second sentence, triggers the second script. This second script has an overlap with the first script, yet their effects are different. In this paper, the difference in effects is defined as script opposition of SSTH. It should be noted that since the jokes are taken from children’s books, the situations that are described may be atypical for adult literature and normal situations. For example, abstract or nonliving entities act or are described as living. And living things gain extra benefits such as animals talking. For this reason, the standard scripts are modified to accommodate the children’s world.