Preface: Artificial Intelligence of Humor - Computational Humor

Human ability to communicate is incomplete without the use of humor. If a computational system is ever to approximate human communication ability or act as a competent partner in a conversation with a human, humor must be accounted for: it must be detected and dealt with appropriately, and it must be generated at need. Computing is becoming ubiquitous, with more and more systems entering the lives of ordinary people, making it necessary for them to communicate with computers at work, at home, on the drive from home to work and back, effecting their shopping, personal lives, leisure and entertainment (see, for instance, Wilks 2005). The symposium participants, in their papers and in discussions, addressed the needs in and feasibility of such a system and made significant steps in the direction of its implementation. The general goal of the symposium was to advance the state of the art in the direction of developing an AI system (“the system”) capable of understanding the mechanism of a joke at a level sufficient for providing a punch line to a human generated setup (even if unintentional) and conversely, for computer reacting competently to a human generated punch line that follows a setup, generated by either participant. The effort is multidisciplinary in nature, and the participants from several of the contributing disciplines, viz., computational semantics, knowledge representation, computational psychology, humanoid robotics, human-computer interface, human factors, to name just a few, took part in the work of the symposium. In the last decades, humor research has become an intense exploration both of humor theory (Raskin 1985, 2008; Ruch 1998, 2008; Oring 1992, 2008; Davies 1990, 2008; Attardo 1994. 2008; Morreall 1983, 2008; Attardo and Raskin 1991, Ruch et al. 1993) and of computational humor (Lessard & Levison 1992, Raskin & Attardo 1994, Binsted & Ritchie 1994, Morkes et al. 1998, Ritchie 2001, Nijholt 2002, O’Mara and Waller 2003, Binsted et al. 2006, Ritchie et al. 2006, Mihalcea and Strapparava 2005, 2006, Mihalcea and Pulman 2007), starting with attempts at humor generation (ibid), through humor detection (see Taylor 2008, 2010a,b, Taylor and Mazlack 2005, Tinholt and Nijholt 2007, Nijholt 2007 and references there), to semantically based systems (Raskin 1996, 2002, Raskin et al. 2009). While 20+ disciplines have contributed significant results to humor research, the field remains fragmented along the disciplinary lines. At humor research conferences, the participants have learned to listen to each other politely and then go on with their own research. In computational humor, in particular, where it is becoming increasingly clear that only a truly multidisciplinary effort can reach the goal of effective communication among humans, intelligent agents, and robots, and no real social computing without full humor competence will result otherwise, the disciplines show up, as it were, but do not merge their efforts nor enrich each other’s approach. Very few participants at the humor conferences are interested in computational humor; there is a rare occasional paper on humor at computational conferences. The symposium provided a practically unprecedented focused venue for overcoming the fragmentation of the effort, certainly the first ever in the Western Hemisphere, and to focus on modeling the human ability to detect and to generate humor rather than using rigid templates to generate artificial jokes in toy systems. To emphasize this human-oriented aspect, the Symposium made sure to attract not only psychologists of humor but also researchers into non-standard humor competences, such as those of psychiatric and autistic-spectrum patients. The Symposium invited a few papers, reviewed the submissions of research papers, and encouraged the participants to suggest panels, round table discussions, mini-symposia, special sessions, etc.