One does not simply produce funny memes! – Explorations on the Automatic Generation of Internet humor Hugo Gonc¸alo Oliveira, Diogo Costa, Alexandre Miguel Pinto CISUC, Department of Informatics Engineering University of Coimbra, Portugal [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] Abstract production of novel artefacts with humor value. Though lim- ited in terms of size, an evaluation survey pointed out that, This paper reports on the automatic generation of image despite frequently producing coherent text, there is work to macro based Internet memes – potentially funny combina- tions of an image and text, intended to be spread in social do in the selection of the suitable image macros, as well networks. Memes are produced for news headlines for which, as on the surprise and humor value of the produced arte- based on linguistic features, a suitable macro is selected and facts. Yet, although better than MEMEGERA 2.0 overall, the text is adapted. The generation method is described to- human-generated memes also failed to consistently reach gether with its current implementation, which integrates a va- top-performance, which shows that the creation of memes riety of tools and resources. Illustrative examples are also is challenging, even for humans. presented. Results of a human evaluation showed that, de- In the remainder of this paper, we provide background spite positive and neutral assessments, overall, automatically- knowledge and work on related topics, including computa- generated memes are still below those produced by humans. tional linguistic creativity and computational humor. The meme generation method is then described and followed by Introduction details on its current implementation, for Portuguese, our Internet memes are a current trend, typically jokes, that gain native language. MEMEGERA 2.0 exploits a variety of tools influence through transmission in social media (Davison, and resources for collecting data, processing text, and for 2012). A popular kind is the image macro – a set of stylistic combining and publishing the results. Several illustrative rules for adding text (e.g. “One does not simply X”, “What memes generated by MEMEGERA 2.0 are then shown and if I told you Y”) to images, with a specific semantics. Most contextualised. Before concluding, the conducted evaluation memes are a product of human creativity and their automatic and its results are discussed. generation is thus a challenge for computational creativity. This paper reports on an exploratory approach for the au- Background and Related Work tomatic generation of Internet memes for news headlines Given a news headline, MEMEGERA 2.0 generates Internet – or better, protomemes, which may eventually become memes that combine an image and a piece of text. This in- memes if spread through the Web. Following our previ- volves the automatic selection of an adequate image macro ous work (Costa, Gonc¸alo Oliveira, and Pinto, 2015), where for the headline and the adaptation of the headline text ac- memes were generated for trendy people, towards whom fa- cording to the macro, with a humor intent. After a short mous quotes were adapted and added to their images, we introduction on the concept of Internet memes, this section now present a system with a similar goal, but with signifi- enumerates previous work on computational linguistic cre- cant differences. Given a headline, MEMEGERA 2.0: auto- ativity with a focus on humor generation. Not forgetting the matically selects a suitable well-known image macro from a role the image plays on the memes, the section ends with a predefined set; adapts the text according to the macro rules; reference to visual humor and its combination with text. and combines the text with the image. The result is ready to be consumed. Following the recent trend of using Twitter as Internet Memes a showcase for linguistic creativity (Veale, Valitutti, and Li, The term meme originally refers to an idea, behaviour, 2015), an implemented Twitterbot posts a new meme every or style that spreads from person to person within a cul- hour. Besides the main challenge, the bot’s feed can be used ture (Dawkins, 1976). In the Web 2.0 era, it was adopted as an alternative and funny way of following recent news. to denote a piece of culture, typically a joke, which gains The illustrative examples presented here, as well as the influence through online transmission (Davison, 2012). A memes posted on Twitter, confirm that our main goal was popular kind of meme is the image macro, which involves achieved: given a headline, a coherent combination of im- a set of stylistic rules for adding text to images. The same age and text, easily recognisable as an Internet meme, and text can be added to different images or different text can be with a relation to the headline, is produced. A more chal- added to a common image. We focus on latter. Yet, the new lenging goal, discussed in the end of the paper, involves the piece of text should be analogous to the original, which is 243 Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Computational Creativity, June 2016 238 either achieved by using a similar linguistic template or by coherence of the original sentence. An illustrative output is: transmitting a similar idea. Well-known memes of this kind I’ve sent you my fart.. I mean ‘part’ not ‘fart’.... include an image of Boromir, from the “Lord of the Rings”, Humor has been studied from a variety of perspectives, with a phrase that fills the template “One does not simply X”, such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and also via as an analogy to the original “One does not simply walk into the computational approach. Raskin (2008) compiles re- Mordor”; Morpheus, from the “Matrix” movie, with “What search on humor, also covering an overview on computa- if I told you Y”; or Batman slapping Robin, with a person- tional approaches to verbal humor, up until 2008. Those alised text in their speech balloons. cover different types of jokes, such as punning riddles or Davison (2012) separates a meme into three compo- funny acronyms. nents: manifestation – the observable part of the meme phe- Early work by Binsted and Ritchie (1994) implemented nomenon; behavior – which creates the manifestation and the JAPE system for generating punning riddles. It exploits: is the action taken by an individual in service of the meme; a lexicon with syntactic and semantic information on words and ideal – the concept or idea conveyed. For the memes by and their meaning; a set of schemata for combining two MEMEGERA 2.0, the manifestation is the image, the behav- words based on their lexical or phonetic relationships; and a ior involves adding a piece of text to the image, and the ideal set of templates that render the riddle (e.g. What do you get is to make fun of an event through its analogy with previous when you cross X with Y?). uses of the macro. The HAHAcronym (Stock and Strapparava, 2005) system rewrites existing acronyms with a humor intent. It relies on Linguistic Creativity with a focus on Humor an incongruity detector and generator that, after parsing ex- The domain of computational linguistic creativity is dis- isting acronyms, decides what words to keep unchanged and cussed by Veale (2012), who highlights the Web as a large what to replace. Replacing words should keep the initial and open source of everyday knowledge, especially on the letter of the original and, at the same time, belong to oppos- way language is used, and suitable for exploitation by cre- ing domains or be antonym adjectives, while also consider- ative systems. Linguistic creativity can take familiar knowl- ing rhythm and rhymes (e.g. the acronym FBI may become edge, sometimes old-forgotten references, and re-invent it in Fantastic Bureau of Intimidation). Given a concept and an novel and surprising ways. It often relies in the intelligent attribute, HAHAcronym can also generate new acronyms adaptation of well-known text to a new context. from scratch, which must be must be words in a dictionary Notable examples of computational linguistic creativ- (e.g. ‘processor’ and ‘fast’ results in OPEN – Online Pro- ity include the generation of metaphors, neologisms, slo- cessor for Effervescent Net). gans, poetry and humor. On the former, Veale and Hao Besides English, there were attempts for generating puns (2008) exploit a small set of common textual patterns in in Japanese (e.g. Sjobergh¨ and Araki (2007)), but we are not the Web for acquiring salient properties of nouns, then aware of any work of this kind for Portuguese. used for explaining known metaphors and generating new In addition to those that share our final goal – to gener- ones (e.g. Paris Hilton is a pole). Smith, Hintze, and ate humor – the aforementioned works reuse familiar knowl- Ventura (2014) create neologisms by blending two con- edge and adapt it to a new context, as MEMEGERA 2.0 does cepts, either from language, or from pop culture lists (e.g. with the macros, known by the general audience and adapted neologism + creator = Nehovah). Gatti et al. (2015) adapt to the context of a headline, obtained from the Web. De- well-known expressions (e.g. cliches,´ song and movie titles) pending on the selected macro, text adaptations may range to suit as creative slogans or news headlines in a four-step from none, to replacing a single word or longer fragment, in approach: (i) retrieval of recent news; (ii) keyword extrac- a similar fashion to those that rely on lexical replacement for tion; (iii) pairing news with expressions, based on their se- producing different kinds of linguistically-creative artefacts. mantic similarity; (iv) replacing one word of the expression Given the key role of the images of memes, the following by a word related to the news, based on dependency statis- section focuses on humor through images or their combina- tics.