Laughter abounds in the mouths of computers: Investigations in automatic humor recognition

Abstract

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 or generation of humor. In this paper, we investigate the problem of humor recognition, and bring empirical evidence that computational approaches can be successfully applied to this task. 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. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.