April 18, Wednesday 14:15, Room 303, Jacobs Building
Humor-centered computing is impossible without humor. In order for it to have humor, humor must be formalized and made computable. For it to happen, there must exist a theory of humor suitable for computation. For a quarter of a century, the humor community has thought there was a reliable formal linguistic theory: on a full comprehension of its nature, it has allowed for reasonable consensus on joke analyses and their reproducibility by human experts. With the development and availability of semantic computing, however, it has become clear to the principals that the theory is not quite adequate. The talk focuses on elevating the currently dominant formal theory of humor to a level suitable for computational use and developing a computational system capable of understanding the joke mechanism. This mechanism will enable the computer to provide a punch line to a human generated setup (even if unintentional) and conversely, to react competently to a human generated punch line that follows a setup that is generated by either participant. The talk will utilize the Ontological Semantic Technology resources and algorithms that are applied to comprehensive meaning representations of jokes and individual preferences for them.