The act of creating humorous acronyms

Abstract

Our species cannot survive without humor and future human-machine interaction systems will be required to handle humor. From a practical point of view, humor is an important resource for getting selective attention, help in memorizing names and situations, etc. Even if deep modeling of humor in all of its facets is not something available in the near future, there is something concrete that has been achieved and that can help in providing attention to the field. The paper refers to the results of HAHACRONYM, a project devoted to humorous acronym production, a circumscribed task that nonetheless requires various generic components. The project opens the way to developments for creative language. Electronic commerce, for instance, will include flexible and individual-oriented humorous promotion more or less as it happened in the world of broadcasted advertisement.