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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...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Kao, Justine T., Levy, Roger, Goodman, Noah D.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: John Wiley and Sons Inc. 2015
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.
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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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