A fun New York Times article about software that can recognize, analyze, and/or create jokes:
Siri's humor is hardcoded in, but soon enough software like Siri will be able to make up jokes on the fly -- assuming we want it to!
A Motherboard Walks Into a Bar ...
Standup (for System to Augment Non-Speakers Dialogue Using Puns) [is] a program that generates punning riddles to help kids with language disabilities increase their verbal skills.
Standup, for instance, writes jokes by searching through a "lexical database" for words that fit linguistic patterns found in puns -- phonetic and semantic similarities, mostly -- and comes up with doozies like: What do you call a fish tank that has a horn? A goldfish bull.
The article mentions "computational humor researchers". I've yet to meet someone with that job title on his or her business card, but I have talked to people about computational linguistics, something we Siri users are experiencing more and more. The goal of those researchers, the article says, is to "design machines akin to the shipboard computer on Star Trek -- ones that can answer open-ended questions and carry on casual conversations with human beings."Standup (for System to Augment Non-Speakers Dialogue Using Puns) [is] a program that generates punning riddles to help kids with language disabilities increase their verbal skills.
Standup, for instance, writes jokes by searching through a "lexical database" for words that fit linguistic patterns found in puns -- phonetic and semantic similarities, mostly -- and comes up with doozies like: What do you call a fish tank that has a horn? A goldfish bull.
Siri's humor is hardcoded in, but soon enough software like Siri will be able to make up jokes on the fly -- assuming we want it to!