
Unsupervised joke generation from big data - wodow
http://www.acl2013.org/site/short/2197.html
======
jlgreco
The last time automated joke generation was discussed on HN, I learned that a
large, or at least vocal, amount of people consider it to the be
responsibility of anybody running automatic joke generation software to
supervise the software to ensure that no truly offensive jokes are
inadvertently generated.

I don't agree that such a responsibility exists, but it is probably worth
keeping in mind that others do if you are interested in surfacing computer
generated content like this. _I_ would be wary of surfacing it without some
form of auditing.

~~~
VladRussian2
interesting ethical question - one is supposedly responsible for behavior of
his automated tool/robot. If that automated tool is able to build and initiate
execution of another, more complex (well big "if" of course here) automated
tool ... at what level of complexity of separation the original responsibility
ends, if any.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
How would you even build a bot to build a joke-bot? Genetic algorithms?

~~~
peter-fogg
Chances are any genetic algorithm would be impractical due to the necessity of
using a human as a fitness function. Unless you could create a neural network
to classify jokes as funny or not... which immediately suggests to me an AI
version of that standup comedy competition. Hm; maybe I have a new side
project.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I hate to say this, but South Park Did It. It resulted in a comedic Dalek.

------
jaryd
Link to actual paper:
[http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s0894589/petrovic13unsupervise...](http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s0894589/petrovic13unsupervised.pdf)

~~~
MrVitaliy
I enjoyed their creative abbreviation of terms part-of-speech (POS), local
log-likelihood (LOL) and Rank of likelihood (ROFL)!

~~~
user24
POS is a standard abbreviation for part-of-speech, but I assume the others
aren't ;)

------
blauwbilgorgel
I am writing a bot to play Cards Against Humanity.

One trick to know if a sentence is funny or controversial that works quite
well: Simply have the bot post it in an IRC channel or chat-room and count the
number of responses it elicits (and give extra weight to words like "lol").

The more people fail the Turing-test, the funnier/controversial the statement.

~~~
TrevorJ
Anecdotal, but I've found that if you play one player 'at random' where you
simply draw and play the card unseen, that random player tends to do pretty
well and even win a significant number of times.

I think what this draws on is the tendency of humans to interpret unexpected
statements which shift out understanding as humorous. (Joke setup which leads
me to expect punchline x, but what instead what follows is y.)

~~~
dclowd9901
I was thinking this same thing. Hell, Family Guy is practically written on
this algorithm (South Park nailed it).

------
wodow
Edit: The actual paper:
[http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s0894589/petrovic13unsupervise...](http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s0894589/petrovic13unsupervised.pdf)
(thanks to jaryd - I was certain the page on acl2013.org linked to it last
time I checked...)

\---

I like my papers like I like my women - in LaTeX.

(I realise that doesn't fit the rules set down in the paper... or those here
on HN to survive title-moderation ;-) )

More from the Register:
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/02/heard_the_one_about/](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/02/heard_the_one_about/)

And here's how the Scotsman covered it (around the start of the Edinburgh
festival): [http://www.scotsman.com/the-
scotsman-2-7475/scotland/scienti...](http://www.scotsman.com/the-
scotsman-2-7475/scotland/scientists-create-computer-program-to-make-
jokes-1-3028557)

------
Kapura
"I like my relationships like I like my source, open

I like my coffee like I like my war, cold

I like my boys like I like my sectors, bad"

These are the _funny_ jokes. Enthusiasm tempered.

~~~
blt
Their joke model misses one thing: each noun has to be commonly used in the
phrase "I like my <noun> <adj>". People often say "I like my coffee black" but
nobody ever says "I like my source open." I think that is why they sound
weird. But I like the off-kilter unexptectedness.

~~~
mjn
For jokes in this pattern, there's a somewhat more hard-coded twitter bot that
I think does a better job:
[https://twitter.com/ilikelikeilike](https://twitter.com/ilikelikeilike)

It does jokes of the form "I like my <noun1> like I like my <noun2>: <adj>,
<adj>, [and not] <adj>".

noun1 is taken from a hand-coded list (hookups, fellas, lovers, spouses,
etc.). noun2 is chosen randomly. Then the adjectives are just the top three
adjectives found preceding noun2 in a corpus.

So for example,

    
    
        I like my men like I like my banking: inefficient, shadow, not shady.
    

'men' was chosen from the hard-coded list. 'banking' was just a random noun.
"inefficient banking", "shadow banking", and "shady banking" are common
phrases in the corpus, so those three adjectives were chosen.

~~~
yid
Two plugs in the same thread, come on!

------
jere
If you want a steady stream of this kind of thing, check out the following
twitter bot:
[https://twitter.com/ilikelikeilike](https://twitter.com/ilikelikeilike)

Darius Kazemi writes a lot of twitter bots and I find @AmIRiteBot pretty funny
(if only in a it's so bad it's good way):
[https://twitter.com/amiritebot](https://twitter.com/amiritebot)

For example: #YouDontKnowWhatStruggleIsIf? More like You Dont Know What
Snuggle Is If, amirite?

~~~
lifeformed
Some of these are pretty hilarious, in a non sequitur kind of way:

> I like my hook-ups like I like my dignity: immense, quiet, and not human.

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tantalor
This type of a joke is a snowclone. See also,

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone)

[http://snowclones.org/](http://snowclones.org/)

------
xerophyte12932
I considered working on this once. Especially "comeback" generation. If you
look at the comments (or replies to comments) on 9GAG, most of them are pretty
generic and follow some basic rules. I figure even a computer can learn to
make them.

~~~
bluepnume
Well, you certainly set your sights high.

~~~
mkopinsky
This provides a possible source for inspiration: Perhaps 9gag is not actually
full of dumb people, but of dumb bots.

Faith in humanity restored?

If only it were so easy.

------
newtover
The MT Summit's Program contains an eye-catcher as well: Modeling Hip Hop
Challenge-Response Lyrics as Machine Translation
([http://www.mtsummit2013.info/programme.asp](http://www.mtsummit2013.info/programme.asp))

------
biesnecker
Isn't this how the AI in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress gets started?

~~~
mooreds
I'm glad someone mentioned this!

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cpeterso
I heard a story on NPR about an IBM research group developing an AI system to
generate new recipes. The system analyzed existing recipes and knew about the
biochemistry of human taste. I can't find an online reference.

~~~
Someone
[http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/creating-
recipes...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/creating-recipes-with-
artificial-intelligence) (for me, that was Google's top link for 'ibm ai
recipe generation')

And it comes with a joke in the comments:

    
    
      Q: So, what would I use my supercomputer for?
      A: Well . . . , you could keep your recipes on there.
    

[for those too young to know: putting your recipes in a database was _the_
example mentioned when people asked what they could use a home computer for.
Utterly impractical, as loading your 20 recipes from cassette would take ages
a d would exhaust your computer's memory. Also, nobody had a television in the
kitchen, and you needed one to use that home computer]

~~~
cpeterso
Thanks! The "ai" keyword was the key. I had tried "ibm recipe generation" and
"ibm recipe generator", but the results were just links about WSDL or PRNGs.
:)

------
Groxx
33% might be a bit generous for humans.

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pvnick
I've been interested in something like this ever since I saw Monty Python's
The Funniest Joke in the World [1]. Tldr, it's a joke so funny, that it
literally kills you after you hear it. I wonder what to what limit a humor
generation algorithm could diverge. Could it be a joke funnier than anything
anybody's ever seen?

[1]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gpjk_MaCGM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gpjk_MaCGM)

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kevincennis
I like this part:

"This Rank OF Likelihood (ROFL)"

------
netrus
Truly Ig Nobel Prize worthy.

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jes5199
They chose not to put an example joke in the abstract?

~~~
emiliobumachar
I suppose it's hard enough to be taken seriously when your research topic is
jokes.

------
VladRussian2
i wonder did anybody try the same for HN comments? what would be the karma?

~~~
kevincennis
I wrote a Markov Chain HN comment generator a few months ago. I'd say a solid
70% of them were pretty funny.

~~~
VladRussian2
there seems to be a market coming soon for such software - on one side
government and politicians need to push their propaganda domestically and
internationally through web2.0 and social media channels, on the other side
ordinary people may soon want to have artificial realistic chatter generation
tools as a way to increase chances of preserving privacy of their
communications.

------
zindlerb
Content like this is what makes HN great. Very interesting read.

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liotier
In Soviet Russia, unsupervised jokes generate big data !

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ffk
This just in! Computers have no sense of humor! ;)

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dorkrawk
I would love to look at the code behind this work.

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grrrando
Can't we just study @Horse_ebooks?

~~~
darkstalker
Most twitter bots use Markov chains

~~~
j2d3
@scuzzlebot uses them... by the fact that he is an implementation of MegaHAL
([http://megahal.alioth.debian.org/](http://megahal.alioth.debian.org/)).

He's out of order right now. I plan to fix him when I've got time. For a while
he ended up tweeting tons of nonsense with no spaces between words... my
fault. Anyway I will fix him up again soon, but hope to (in my copious free
time HAHAHAHAH) redo him in a more exciting way.

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coldcode
I fail to see the humor in this.

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chintan
"Humor generation is a very hard problem"

That was funny! see its not that hard.

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tomphoolery
we must apply these to memes IMMEDIATELY!

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gabriel34
Funnybot online...AWKWARD!!

On a more serious note, it's a nice, albeit kind of low on benefit/cost,
application for Big Data.

