2019/01/10 by Robert West, Eric Horvitz, West, Robert +1 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Artificial Intelligence in Games #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Digital Games and Media #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Humor Studies and Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1901.03253
openalex publication_date 2019/01/10 · openalex created_date 2022/07/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Humor is an essential human trait. Efforts to understand humor have called\nout links between humor and the foundations of cognition, as well as the\nimportance of humor in social engagement. As such, it is a promising and\nimportant subject of study, with relevance for artificial intelligence and\nhuman-computer interaction. Previous computational work on humor has mostly\noperated at a coarse level of granularity, e.g., predicting whether an entire\nsentence, paragraph, document, etc., is humorous. As a step toward deep\nunderstanding of humor, we seek fine-grained models of attributes that make a\ngiven text humorous. Starting from the observation that satirical news\nheadlines tend to resemble serious news headlines, we build and analyze a\ncorpus of satirical headlines paired with nearly identical but serious\nheadlines. The corpus is constructed via Unfun.me, an online game that\nincentivizes players to make minimal edits to satirical headlines with the goal\nof making other players believe the results are serious headlines. The edit\noperations used to successfully remove humor pinpoint the words and concepts\nthat play a key role in making the original, satirical headline funny. Our\nanalysis reveals that the humor tends to reside toward the end of headlines,\nand primarily in noun phrases, and that most satirical headlines follow a\ncertain logical pattern, which we term false analogy. Overall, this paper\ndeepens our understanding of the syntactic and semantic structure of satirical\nnews headlines and provides insights for building humor-producing systems.\n