Technologies that Make You Smile: Adding Humour to Text-based Applications

Humor is an aspect of human behavior considered essential for inter-personal communication. Despite this fact, research in human-computer interaction has almost completely neglected aspects concerned with the automatic recognition, generation, or use of humor. In this paper, we address three important research questions related to the recognition and use of verbally expressed humor, and bring empirical evidence that computational approaches can be successfully applied to these tasks. First, we show that it is possible to automatically construct a very large collection of humorous texts, using a novel technique for Web-based bootstrapping. Second, through experiments performed on very large data sets, we show that automatic classification techniques can be effectively used to distinguish between humorous and non-humorous texts, with significant improvements observed over apriori known baselines. Finally, we show how an automatic method for the selection and addition of contextualized humorous text can improve the user-experience and overall quality of two widely used computer-based applications.