Computer, Tell Me a Joke ... but Please Make it Funny: Computational Humor with Ontological Semantics Christian F. Hempelmann1, Victor Raskin2, and Katrina E. Triezenberg2 Georgia Southern University1 Purdue University2 Department of Writing and Linguistics NLP Lab and Linguistics Program Statesboro, GA 30460 West Lafayette, IN 47905
[email protected] {vraskin, kattriez}@purdue.edu Abstract based human-computer interaction. Finally, an additional Computational humor is a subdiscipline of computational benefit of studying computational humor can be reaped for linguistics with applications in human computer interfaces, those interested in humor, as it requires formalization of edutainment, affective computing, intelligent agents, and the key components in order to make them palatable to the other areas. Based on ontological semantics, we develop the dumb machine. resources and algorithms the computer needs to understand and produce humor, in principle and on a detailed example. Before and since Apple’s joke teller, little progress has Our ultimate output will not be that of a toy system that fills been made in computational humor, both in humor analysis in templates, previously the only available approach, but and humor generation (HG), and we predict that extant rather true natural language generation, based on the template-based systems are not going to lead to computer approximation of the human understanding of the joke. This paper shows how ontological semantics provides breakthroughs in natural language engineering, and much for and computes the full computer understanding of humor, less in forcing us to create theories that could tell us about a sine qua non of humor generation. the mechanisms involved in human humor use.