Abstract
Humour is one of the most amazing characteristics that defines us as human beings and social entities. Its study supposes a deep insight into several areas such as linguistics, psychology or philosophy. From the Natural Language Processing (NLP) perspective, recent researches have shown that humour can be automatically generated and recognized with some success. In this work we present a study carried out on a collection of English texts in order to investigate whether or not semantic and morphosyntactic ambiguities may be employed as features in the automatic humour recognition task. The results we have obtained show that it is possible to discriminate humorous from non humorous sentences through features like perplexity or sense dispersion.
We would like to thank Rada Mihalcea and Carlo Strapparava for kindly sharing their one-liners corpus. The MiDEs (CICYT TIN2006-15265-C06) and TeLMoSis (UPV PAID083294) research projects have partially funded this work. The National Council for Science and Technology (CONACyT - Mexico) has funded the research work of Antonio Reyes.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Attardo, S.: Linguistic Theories of Humor. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin (1994)
Attardo, S.: Humorous Texts: A semantic and pragmatic analysis. Mouton De Gruyter, Berlin (2001)
Basili, R., Zanzotto, F.: Parsing Engineering and Empirical Robustness. Journal of Natural Language Engineering 8(3), 97–120 (2002)
Binsted, K.: Machine humour: An implemented model of puns. PhD thesis. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland (1996)
Binsted, K., Ritchie, G.: Computational rules for punning riddles. Humor. Walter de Gruyter Co. 10, 25–75 (1997)
Binsted, K., Ritchie, G.: Towards a model of story puns. Humor 14(3), 275–292 (2001)
Buscaldi, D., Rosso, P.: Some experiments in Humour Recognition using the Italian Wikiquote collection. In: Masulli, F., Mitra, S., Pasi, G. (eds.) WILF 2007. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4578, pp. 464–468. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Jurafsky, D., Martin, J.: Speech and Language Processing: An introduction to natural language processing, computational linguistics, and speech recognition, Draft of June 25 (2007)
Langacker, R.: Concept, Image and Symbol. In: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar. Mounton de Gruyter, Berlin (1991)
Mihalcea, R.: Multidisciplinary Facets of Research on Humour. In: Masulli, F., Mitra, S., Pasi, G. (eds.) WILF 2007. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4578, pp. 412–421. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Mihalcea, R., Strapparava, C.: Technologies that make you smile: Adding humour to text-based applications. IEEE Intelligent Systems 21(5), 33–39 (2006)
Mihalcea, R., Strapparava, C.: Learning to Laugh (Automatically): Computational Models for Humor Recognition. Journal of Computational Intelligence 22(2), 126–142 (2006)
Mihalcea, R., Pulman, S.: Characterizing Humour: An Exploration of Features in Humorous Texts. In: Gelbukh, A. (ed.) CICLing 2007. LNCS, vol. 4394, pp. 337–347. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Miller, G.: Wordnet: A lexical database. Communications of the ACM 38(11), 39–41 (1995)
Quasthoff, U., Richter, M., Biemann, C.: Corpus Portal for Search in Monolingual Corpora. In: Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC, pp. 1799–1802 (2006)
Raskin, V.: Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. D. Reidel, Dordrecht (1985)
Ruch, W.: The Perception of Humor. In: Kaszniak, A. (ed.) Emotion, Qualia, and Consciousness, Tokyo, pp. 410–425 (2001)
Schmid, H.: Improvements in Part-of-Speech Tagging with an Application to German. In: Proceedings of the ACL SIGDAT Workshop (1995)
Sjöbergh, J., Araki, K.: Recognizing Humor without Recognizing Meaning. In: Masulli, F., Mitra, S., Pasi, G. (eds.) WILF 2007. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4578, pp. 469–476. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Stock, O., Strapparava, C.: Hahacronym: A computational humor system. In: Demo Proc. of the 43rd annual meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics (ACL 2005), pp. 113–116 (2005)
Stolcke, A.: SRILM - An Extensible Language Modeling Toolkit. In: Proc. Intl. Conf. Spoken Language Processing, Denver, Colorado (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Reyes, A., Buscaldi, D., Rosso, P. (2010). The Impact of Semantic and Morphosyntactic Ambiguity on Automatic Humour Recognition. In: Horacek, H., Métais, E., Muñoz, R., Wolska, M. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Information Systems. NLDB 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5723. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12550-8_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-12550-8_11
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-12549-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-12550-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)