An Experiment in Automated Humorous Output Production

Computational humor will be needed in interfaces, no less than other cognitive capabilities. There are many practical settings where computational humor will add value. Among them there are: business wold applications (such as advertisement, e-commerce, etc...), general computer-mediated communication and human-computer interaction, increase in the friendliness of natural language interfaces, educational ad adutainment systems. In particular in the educational field it is an important resource for getting selective attention, help in memorizing names and situations etc. And we all know how well it works with children. Automated humor production in general is a very difficult task but we wanted to prove that some results can be achieved even in short time. We have worked at a concrete limited problem as the core of the European Project HAHAcronym. The main goal of HAHAcronym has been the realization of an acronym ironic re-analyzer and generator as a proof of concept in a focalized but non restricted context. In order to implement this system some general ttols have been adapted, or developed for the humorous context. System's output has been submitted to evaluation by human subjects, with a very positive result