Date of Publication

2008

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Computer Science

College

College of Computer Studies

Department/Unit

Computer Science

Thesis Adviser

Ethel C. Ong

Defense Panel Chair

Allan B. Borra

Defense Panel Member

Charibeth K. Cheng
Ethel C. Ong

Abstract/Summary

Computational Humor is a growing research field. Computers are being used to communicate with humans. And to make computer conversation more human and natural, humor is needed. Studying humor will give an insight of human creativity, different from simply having a controlled set of sentences (Binsted, 2006).

Pun generator systems depend on manually created templates which require a lot of effort to build. This constrains the possible types of jokes that can be generated. The Template-based Pun Extractor and Generator is a system that learns templates based on training examples. It uses this learned knowledge to generate punning riddles. The learning algorithm utilizes semantic and phonetic knowledge to capture the wordplay used for a joke. Templates contain word relationships, variables and tags. The generation algorithm produces punning riddles based on user keywords and the learned templates. The use of keywords ensures that the joke will be relevant to what the user knows or is interested in. The system is evaluated based on analysis of the corpus, linguist evaluation, and user feedback. Linguist evaluation garnered an average score of 4.0 out of 5, as this evaluated the completeness of the learned templates. The user feedback for generated puns had a score of 2.13 out of 5, while the user feedback for human-made jokes is 2.70 out of 5. This user feedback is to check whether system-generated jokes are as funny as human-made jokes.

Abstract Format

html

Language

English

Format

Print

Accession Number

TG04251; CDTG004251

Shelf Location

Archives, The Learning Commons, 12F Henry Sy Sr. Hall

Physical Description

vi, 78 leaves ; 28 cm. + 1 computer optical disc.

Keywords

Wit and humor--Computer programs; Puns and punning--Computer programs; Natural language processing (Computer science)

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