Abstract

In this work we provided a contribution in the specific context of verbal humor generation, focused on computational creation of humorous texts. The goal consisted of the design and implementation of a tool for the automatic generation of short humorous expressions. We focused on humorous puns generated through the variation of familiar expressions, performed via lexical substitution. Phonetic and semantic features are employed to select the appropriate substitution. We have chosen a corpus-based approach, in line with a tendency prevailing in the computational linguistics field. A number of textual corpora and dictionaries were employed. We have developed some of these resources (WordNet-Affect and Affective-Weight) in an early stage of the research. The system can be used as a testbed for the empirical investigation of various aspects of verbal humor. More specifically, it can be used to study the correlation between linguistic parameters of humorous expressions and appraisal dimensions that are part of the cognitive process of humor understanding. In the last phase of the work, we developed two exploratory applications: a prototype was developed as a first component of a system in which task-oriented assistance and humorous feedback can be integrated to achieve frustration reduction. The other application developed is a tool for the collaborative creation of puns. In this system, the pun generator is integrated with a graphical user interface based on a dynamic graph, helping the exploration of different creative solutions.