Towards joking, humor sense equipped and emotion aware conversational systems

Abstract

In this paper, we present our progress so far in realization of project aimed to create a complex, modular humor-equipped conversational system. By complex, we mean that it should be able to: (1) detect users’ emotions, (2) detect users’ humorous behaviors and react to them properly, (3) generate humor according to users’ emotive states and (4) learn each user’s individual sense of humor. The research is conducted in Japanese. We chose puns as a relatively computable genre of humor. We describe a general outline of our system, as well as its four modules: humor detection module, emotion recognition module, response generator module and individualisation module. We present the algorithm of systems used in each module, along with some evaluation results.