A long short-term memory framework for predicting humor in dialogues

Abstract

We propose a first-ever attempt to employ a Long Short-Term memory based framework to predict humor in dialogues. We analyze data from a popular TV-sitcom, whose canned laughters give an indication of when the audience would react. We model the setup-punchline relation of conversational humor with a Long Short-Term Memory, with utterance encodings obtained from a Convolutional Neural Network. Out neural network framework is able to improve the F-score of 8% over a Conditional Random Field baseline. We show how the LSTM effectively models the setup-punchline relation reducing the number of false positives and increasing the recall. We aim to employ our humor prediction model to build effective empathetic machine able to understand jokes.