Pragmatically Computationally Difficult Pragmatics to Recognize Humour

The humour found in short jokes and their often equivalent newspaper cartoons graphic representations are often dependent on the results of ambiguity in human speech. The ambiguities can be unexpected and funny. Sometimes wellknown ambiguities cooperatively repeated can also be funny. Captioned cartoons often derive their humour from an unexpected ambiguity that can be understood by a listener who can automatically use world knowledge to resolve the ambiguity. The question considered here is whether the listener can be a computational device as well as a human and the pragmatic difficulty of applying linguistic pragmatics to do so. Computational analysis of natural language statements needs to successfully resolve ambiguous statements. Computerized understanding of dialogue must not only include syntactic and semantic analysis, but also pragmatic analysis. Pragmatics includes an understanding of the speaker’s intentions, the context of the utterance, and social implications of human communication, both polite and hostile. Computational techniques can use restricted world knowledge in resolving ambiguous language use. This paper considers the pragmatic difficulties in recognizing humour in short jokes as well as their representation in cartoons.