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1 1 of 5 8/14/ :11 PM Home Archive Templates Forum Contact Sitemap Search Keywords Search AI understands joke Posted in Technology on , 12:57 Artificial intelligence experts, Julia Taylor and Lawrence Mazlack (University of Cincinnati, Ohio), have built a computer program that can understand simple jokes. This is a great and important step in making robots seem friendlier to humans. Here is the first joke which the computer appreciated: Mother: "My, you've been working in the garden a lot this summer." Boy: "I have to, because teacher told me to work a lot" (thus a pun on working the soil and doing schoolwork). Previously AI researchers have tended not to try mimicking humour, largely because the human sense of humour is so subjective and complex, making it difficult to program. Now Taylor and Mazlack have built a computer program that is able to get a specific type of joke - one whose crux is a simple pun. They say this budding cyber wit could lend a sense of humour to physical robots acting as human companions or helpers, which will need to be able to spot jokes if they are to be accepted and not just annoy people. To teach the program to spot jokes, the researchers first gave it a database of words, extracted from a children's dictionary to keep things simple, and then supplied examples of how words can be related to one another in different

2 2 of 5 8/14/ :11 PM ways to create different meanings. When presented with a new passage, the program uses that knowledge to work out how those new words relate to each other and what they likely mean. When it finds a word that doesn't seem to fit with its surroundings, it searches a digital pronunciation guide for similar-sounding words. If any of those words fits in better with the rest of the sentence, it flags the passage as a joke. The result is a bot that "gets" jokes that turn on a simple pun. Another kind of humour-spotting bot have been built in Denton, Texas. Instead of working out why a sentence might be funny, it learns the frequencies of words that are found in jokes, and uses that to identify humour. Words that top the list is among others "can't", "don't", "drunk" and "poor". People like laughing about bad things. Source: New Scientist, Yahoo! News UK This article hasn't been commented yet. Write a comment * Name: Website URL: * Comment: * Perform an addition of two integers to avoid spam: = Submit Recent entries Cat Stevens - The Old Schoolyard 3D Total CSS library Study finds weak link in spam business Forum installed Cat Stevens - Father and Son Top 8 design websites Gmail: A Behind the Scenes Video

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