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Emotion-Oriented Systems pp 609–634Cite as

Computational Humour

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Part of the book series: Cognitive Technologies ((COGTECH))

Abstract

Computational humour is a challenge with connections and implications in many artificial intelligence areas, including natural language processing, intelligent human–computer interaction, and reasoning, as well as in other fields such as cognitive science, linguistics, and psychology. Of particular interest is its connection to emotions. In this chapter we overview the basic theories of humour and present the main contributions made in the field of computational verbal humour, including applications for automatic humour generation and humour recognition.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    EU project IST-2000-30039 (partners: ITC-irst and University of Twente), part of the Future Emerging Technologies section of the Fifth European Framework Program.

  2. 2.

    It is freely available for research purposes at http://wndomains.itc.it (visited 30 May 2010).

  3. 3.

    Available at http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict (visited 30 May 2010).

  4. 4.

    The sentence most similar to a one-liner is identified by running the one-liner against an index built for all BNC sentences with a length of 10–15 words. We use a tf.idf weighting scheme and a cosine similarity measure, as implemented in the Smart system (ftp.cs.cornell.edu/pub/smart, visited 30 May 2010).

  5. 5.

    The first sentences in this corpus are considered to be “cleaner”, as they were contributed by trusted users (Push Singh, p.c.).

  6. 6.

    WordNet Domains assigns each synset in WordNet with one or more “domain” labels, such as Sport, Medicine, Economy. See http://wndomains.itc.it.

  7. 7.

    We also experimented with decision trees learned from a larger number of examples, but the results were similar, which confirms our hypothesis that these features are heuristics, rather than learnable properties that improve their accuracy with additional training data.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fondazione Bruno Kessler-Irst, Povo, Trento, Italy

    Carlo Strapparava & Oliviero Stock

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA

    Rada Mihalcea

Authors
  1. Carlo Strapparava
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  2. Oliviero Stock
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  3. Rada Mihalcea
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Carlo Strapparava .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Department of Psychology, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, BT7 1NN, United Kingdom

    Roddy Cowie

  2. TELECOM ParisTech, CNRS - LTCI, rue Dareau 37, Paris, 75014, France

    Catherine Pelachaud

  3. for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI), Austrian Research Institute, Freyung 6/6, Vienna, 1010, Austria

    Paolo Petta

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Strapparava, C., Stock, O., Mihalcea, R. (2011). Computational Humour. In: Cowie, R., Pelachaud, C., Petta, P. (eds) Emotion-Oriented Systems. Cognitive Technologies. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15184-2_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15184-2_31

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-15183-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-15184-2

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