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  4. Reverse-Engineering Satire, or "Paper on Computational Humor Accepted despite Making Serious Advances"
 
conference paper

Reverse-Engineering Satire, or "Paper on Computational Humor Accepted despite Making Serious Advances"

West, Robert  
•
Horvitz, Eric
January 1, 2019
Thirty-Third Aaai Conference On Artificial Intelligence / Thirty-First Innovative Applications Of Artificial Intelligence Conference / Ninth Aaai Symposium On Educational Advances In Artificial Intelligence
33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence / 31st Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference / 9th AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence

Humor is an essential human trait. Efforts to understand humor have called out links between humor and the foundations of cognition, as well as the importance of humor in social engagement. As such, it is a promising and important subject of study, with relevance for artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Previous computational work on humor has mostly operated at a coarse level of granularity, e.g., predicting whether an entire sentence, paragraph, document, etc., is humorous. As a step toward deep understanding of humor, we seek fine-grained models of attributes that make a given text humorous. Starting from the observation that satirical news headlines tend to resemble serious news headlines, we build and analyze a corpus of satirical headlines paired with nearly identical but serious headlines. The corpus is constructed via Unfun.me, an online game that incentivizes players to make minimal edits to satirical headlines with the goal of making other players believe the results are serious headlines. The edit operations used to successfully remove humor pinpoint the words and concepts that play a key role in making the original, satirical headline funny. Our analysis reveals that the humor tends to reside toward the end of headlines, and primarily in noun phrases, and that most satirical headlines follow a certain logical pattern, which we term false analogy. Overall, this paper deepens our understanding of the syntactic and semantic structure of satirical news headlines and provides insights for building humor-producing systems.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1609/aaai.v33i01.33017265
Web of Science ID

WOS:000486572501099

Author(s)
West, Robert  
Horvitz, Eric
Date Issued

2019-01-01

Publisher

ASSOC ADVANCEMENT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Publisher place

Palo Alto

Published in
Thirty-Third Aaai Conference On Artificial Intelligence / Thirty-First Innovative Applications Of Artificial Intelligence Conference / Ninth Aaai Symposium On Educational Advances In Artificial Intelligence
ISBN of the book

978-1-57735-809-1

Start page

7265

End page

7272

Subjects

rules

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
DLAB  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
33rd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence / 31st Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference / 9th AAAI Symposium on Educational Advances in Artificial Intelligence

Honolulu, HI

Jan 27-Feb 01, 2019

Available on Infoscience
October 9, 2019
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/161903
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