Computationally Recognizing Wordplay in Jokes

In artificial intelligence, researchers have begun to look at approaches for computational humor. Although there appears to be no complete computational model for recognizing verbally expressed humor, it may be possible to recognize jokes based on statistical language recognition techniques. This is an investigation into computational humor recognition. It considers a restricted set of all possible jokes that have wordplay as a component and examines the limited domain of “Knock Knock” jokes. The method uses Raskin's theory of humor for its theoretical foundation. The original phrase and the complimentary wordplay have two different scripts that overlap in the setup of the joke. The algorithm deployed learns statistical patterns of text in N-grams and provides a heuristic focus for a location of where wordplay may or may not occur. It uses a wordplay generator to produce an utterance that is similar in pronunciation to a given word, and the wordplay recognizer determines if the utterance is valid. Once a possible wordplay is discovered, a joke recognizer determines if a found wordplay transforms the text into a joke.