Humour Research: State of the Art

Humour is a multi-disciplinary field of research. People have been working on humour in many fields of research like psychology, philosophy and linguistics, sociology and literature. Especially in the context of computer science (or Artificial Intelligence) humour research aims at modeling humour in a computationally tractable way. Having computational models of humour allows interface designers to have the computer generate and interpret humour when interacting with users. There are many situations in human-human interaction where humour plays an important role in keeping the conversation going. Making use of the so-called CASA paradigm (Computers Are Social Actors) we may expect that a similar role can be played in human-computer interaction. In this report we survey current humour research with the aim to identify useful theories that can be applied in the human-computer interaction context. We focus on the following subjects: humour theories, related humour research, linguistic aspects of humour, computational aspects of humour, applications and resources. 1 University of Twente, Center of Telematics and Information Technology, Technical Report CTIT-02-34, September 2002, 24 pp.