Computers can now Sense Humor
Scientists at the University of Cincinnati, Ohio have claimed to develop a computer that can understand jokes.
Yes it’s true. An American group of scientists has developed a program called “bot”, which is able to understand jokes which mainly revolve around puns. The software can be loaded while making robots, to give them artificial sense of humour.
Julia Taylor and Dr. Lawrence Mazlack at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio are part of the group which is working of the program that identifies jokes based on puns involving different definitions of similar sounding words.
Researches gave a database of words to the computer. Then with the help of the examples of how words can be related to one another in different ways to create different meanings, they taught a machine to spot jokes.
Researchers further said that the computer should understand that jokes such as, a man asking his friend, “How was your trip to Helsinki?”, to which she replies: “Terrible, all our luggage vanished into Finn Air”, as “Finn” is the word which, does not fit within the context of luggage and air, but does sound like “thin”.
However, there are still several puns that the “bot” fails to spot. On the other hand there are still many jokes which are not based on the pun that the “bot” misses.
Julia Taylor is now working on personalizing the program to take into account variation in the user’s sense of humor.
This program was presented last week at the American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference in Vancouver, Canada.
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