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A Computational Model of Linguistic Humor in Puns
Humor plays an essential role in human interactions. Precisely what makes something funny, however, remains elusive. While research on natural language understanding has made significant advancements in recent years, there has been little direct integration of humor research with computational model...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
John Wiley and Sons Inc.
2015
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5042108/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26235596 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12269 |
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author | Kao, Justine T. Levy, Roger Goodman, Noah D. |
author_facet | Kao, Justine T. Levy, Roger Goodman, Noah D. |
author_sort | Kao, Justine T. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Humor plays an essential role in human interactions. Precisely what makes something funny, however, remains elusive. While research on natural language understanding has made significant advancements in recent years, there has been little direct integration of humor research with computational models of language understanding. In this paper, we propose two information‐theoretic measures—ambiguity and distinctiveness—derived from a simple model of sentence processing. We test these measures on a set of puns and regular sentences and show that they correlate significantly with human judgments of funniness. Moreover, within a set of puns, the distinctiveness measure distinguishes exceptionally funny puns from mediocre ones. Our work is the first, to our knowledge, to integrate a computational model of general language understanding and humor theory to quantitatively predict humor at a fine‐grained level. We present it as an example of a framework for applying models of language processing to understand higher level linguistic and cognitive phenomena. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-5042108 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2015 |
publisher | John Wiley and Sons Inc. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-50421082016-10-03 A Computational Model of Linguistic Humor in Puns Kao, Justine T. Levy, Roger Goodman, Noah D. Cogn Sci Brief Reports Humor plays an essential role in human interactions. Precisely what makes something funny, however, remains elusive. While research on natural language understanding has made significant advancements in recent years, there has been little direct integration of humor research with computational models of language understanding. In this paper, we propose two information‐theoretic measures—ambiguity and distinctiveness—derived from a simple model of sentence processing. We test these measures on a set of puns and regular sentences and show that they correlate significantly with human judgments of funniness. Moreover, within a set of puns, the distinctiveness measure distinguishes exceptionally funny puns from mediocre ones. Our work is the first, to our knowledge, to integrate a computational model of general language understanding and humor theory to quantitatively predict humor at a fine‐grained level. We present it as an example of a framework for applying models of language processing to understand higher level linguistic and cognitive phenomena. John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2015-07-31 2016-07 /pmc/articles/PMC5042108/ /pubmed/26235596 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12269 Text en © 2015 The Authors. Cognitive Science published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Cognitive Science Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. |
spellingShingle | Brief Reports Kao, Justine T. Levy, Roger Goodman, Noah D. A Computational Model of Linguistic Humor in Puns |
title | A Computational Model of Linguistic Humor in Puns |
title_full | A Computational Model of Linguistic Humor in Puns |
title_fullStr | A Computational Model of Linguistic Humor in Puns |
title_full_unstemmed | A Computational Model of Linguistic Humor in Puns |
title_short | A Computational Model of Linguistic Humor in Puns |
title_sort | computational model of linguistic humor in puns |
topic | Brief Reports |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5042108/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26235596 http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12269 |
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