<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="H05-1067">
  <Title>Making Computers Laugh: Investigations in Automatic Humor Recognition</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="536" end_page="537" type="relat">
    <SectionTitle>
5 Related Work
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> While humor is relatively well studied in scientific fields such as linguistics (Attardo, 1994) and psychology (Freud, 1905; Ruch, 2002), to date there is only a limited number of research contributions made toward the construction of computational humour prototypes.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> One of the first attempts is perhaps the work described in (Binsted and Ritchie, 1997), where a formal model of semantic and syntactic regularities was devised, underlying some of the simplest types of puns (punning riddles). The model was then exploited in a system called JAPE that was able to automatically generate amusing puns.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Another humor-generation project was the HA-HAcronym project (Stock and Strapparava, 2003), whose goal was to develop a system able to automatically generate humorous versions of existing 6We also like to think of this behavior as if the computer is losing its sense of humor after an overwhelming number of jokes, in a way similar to humans when they get bored and stop appreciating humor after hearing too many jokes.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3">  acronyms, or to produce a new amusing acronym constrained to be a valid vocabulary word, starting with concepts provided by the user. The comic effect was achieved mainly by exploiting incongruity theories (e.g. finding a religious variation for a technical acronym).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> Another related work, devoted this time to the problem of humor comprehension, is the study reported in (Taylor and Mazlack, 2004), focused on a very restricted type of wordplays, namely the &amp;quot;Knock-Knock&amp;quot; jokes. The goal of the study was to evaluate to what extent wordplay can be automatically identified in &amp;quot;Knock-Knock&amp;quot; jokes, and if such jokes can be reliably recognized from other non-humorous text. The algorithm was based on automatically extracted structural patterns and on heuristics heavily based on the peculiar structure of this particular type of jokes. While the wordplay recognition gave satisfactory results, the identification of jokes containing such wordplays turned out to be significantly more difficult.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>