Ironic Expressions and Moving Words

Among forms of creative language, verbal humor has received some attention in the computational milieu. Some aspects of irony and wordplay could be experimented in automated systems. For instance, we developed a system that makes fun of existing acronyms, based mainly on lexical reasoning. The dimension of emotion in words is also starting to be understood among computational linguists. The challenge of electronic advertisements offers in particular a great opportunity for getting now deeper into creative language expression and emotion. An advertising message induces in the recipient a positive or negative attitude toward the advertised object. A prototype we have developed for advertising professionals has two steps: (i) the creative variation of familiar expressions, taking into account the effective content of the produced text, (ii) the automatic animation (semantically consistent with the affective text content) of the resulting expression, using kinetic typography techniques. In thisway the ironic-affective effect is perceptually emphasized.