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Unsupervised joke generation from big data
- wodow 13y agoEdit: The actual paper: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s0894589/petrovic13unsupervised.pdf http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s0894589/petrovic13unsupervise... (thanks to jaryd - I was certain the page on acl2013.org linked to it last time I checked...) --- I like my papers like I like my women - in LaTeX. (I realise that doesn't fit the rules set down in the paper... or those here on HN to survive title-moderation ;-) ) More from the Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/02/heard_the_one_about/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/02/heard_the_one_about/ And here's how the Scotsman covered it (around the start of the Edinburgh festival): http://www.scotsman.com/the-scotsman-2-7475/scotland/scientists-create-computer-program-to-make-jokes-1-3028557 http://www.scotsman.com/the-scotsman-2-7475/scotland/scienti...
- jaryd 13y agoLink to actual paper: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s0894589/petrovic13unsupervised.pdf http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s0894589/petrovic13unsupervise...
- MrVitaliy 13y agoI enjoyed their creative abbreviation of terms part-of-speech (POS), local log-likelihood (LOL) and Rank of likelihood (ROFL)!
- user24 13y agoPOS is a standard abbreviation for part-of-speech, but I assume the others aren't ;)
- joe_the_user 13y agoOh. I see these example: I like my relationships like I like my source, open I like my coffee like I like my war, cold I like my boys like I like my sectors, bad Wow, these feel as hallow and empty as the Shuttle Challenger's hanger.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- chintan 13y ago"Humor generation is a very hard problem" That was funny! see its not that hard.
- Kapura 13y ago"I like my relationships like I like my source, open I like my coffee like I like my war, cold I like my boys like I like my sectors, bad" These are the funny jokes. Enthusiasm tempered.
- ToastyMallows 13y agoTo be fair, these jokes do clearly follow the 4 points laid out in the article. In addition, I did snicker at #2.
- blt 13y agoTheir joke model misses one thing: each noun has to be commonly used in the phrase "I like my <noun> <adj>". People often say "I like my coffee black" but nobody ever says "I like my source open." I think that is why they sound weird. But I like the off-kilter unexptectedness.
- mjn 13y agoFor jokes in this pattern, there's a somewhat more hard-coded twitter bot that I think does a better job: https://twitter.com/ilikelikeilike https://twitter.com/ilikelikeilike It does jokes of the form "I like my <noun1> like I like my <noun2>: <adj>, <adj>, [and not] <adj>". noun1 is taken from a hand-coded list (hookups, fellas, lovers, spouses, etc.). noun2 is chosen randomly. Then the adjectives are just the top three adjectives found preceding noun2 in a corpus. So for example, I like my men like I like my banking: inefficient, shadow, not shady. 'men' was chosen from the hard-coded list. 'banking' was just a random noun. "inefficient banking", "shadow banking", and "shady banking" are common phrases in the corpus, so those three adjectives were chosen.
- yid 13y agoTwo plugs in the same thread, come on!
- jjoonathan 13y agoOh, come on. This kind of joke is supposed to fall into the "so bad, it's good" category, which all three of these do in spades. Especially the bad sectors one.
- netrus 13y agoTruly Ig Nobel Prize worthy.
- gabriel34 13y agoFunnybot online...AWKWARD!! On a more serious note, it's a nice, albeit kind of low on benefit/cost, application for Big Data.
- VladRussian2 13y agoi wonder did anybody try the same for HN comments? what would be the karma?
- kevincennis 13y agoI wrote a Markov Chain HN comment generator a few months ago. I'd say a solid 70% of them were pretty funny.
- VladRussian2 13y agothere seems to be a market coming soon for such software - on one side government and politicians need to push their propaganda domestically and internationally through web2.0 and social media channels, on the other side ordinary people may soon want to have artificial realistic chatter generation tools as a way to increase chances of preserving privacy of their communications.
- grrrando 13y agoCan't we just study @Horse_ebooks?
- darkstalker 13y agoMost twitter bots use Markov chains
- j2d3 13y ago@scuzzlebot uses them... by the fact that he is an implementation of MegaHAL (http://megahal.alioth.debian.org/ http://megahal.alioth.debian.org/). He's out of order right now. I plan to fix him when I've got time. For a while he ended up tweeting tons of nonsense with no spaces between words... my fault. Anyway I will fix him up again soon, but hope to (in my copious free time HAHAHAHAH) redo him in a more exciting way.
- j2d3 13y agoHe has OFTEN been awkward and offensive. I do not censor him nor feel any obligation to do so.
- kevincennis 13y agoI like this part: "This Rank OF Likelihood (ROFL)"
- xerophyte12932 13y agoI considered working on this once. Especially "comeback" generation. If you look at the comments (or replies to comments) on 9GAG, most of them are pretty generic and follow some basic rules. I figure even a computer can learn to make them.
- Groxx 13y ago33% might be a bit generous for humans.
- jere 13y agoIf you want a steady stream of this kind of thing, check out the following twitter bot: https://twitter.com/ilikelikeilike https://twitter.com/ilikelikeilike Darius Kazemi writes a lot of twitter bots and I find @AmIRiteBot pretty funny (if only in a it's so bad it's good way): https://twitter.com/amiritebot https://twitter.com/amiritebot For example: #YouDontKnowWhatStruggleIsIf? More like You Dont Know What Snuggle Is If, amirite?
- lifeformed 13y agoSome of these are pretty hilarious, in a non sequitur kind of way: > I like my hook-ups like I like my dignity: immense, quiet, and not human.
- dorkrawk 13y agoI would love to look at the code behind this work.
- blauwbilgorgel 13y agoI am writing a bot to play Cards Against Humanity. One trick to know if a sentence is funny or controversial that works quite well: Simply have the bot post it in an IRC channel or chat-room and count the number of responses it elicits (and give extra weight to words like "lol"). The more people fail the Turing-test, the funnier/controversial the statement.
- matznerd 13y agowhat language are you writing the bot in?
- blauwbilgorgel 13y agoPython. I'll open source when I am done.
- matznerd 13y agoyes, please do post a link here, thanks!
- TrevorJ 13y agoAnecdotal, but I've found that if you play one player 'at random' where you simply draw and play the card unseen, that random player tends to do pretty well and even win a significant number of times. I think what this draws on is the tendency of humans to interpret unexpected statements which shift out understanding as humorous. (Joke setup which leads me to expect punchline x, but what instead what follows is y.)
- dclowd9901 13y agoI was thinking this same thing. Hell, Family Guy is practically written on this algorithm (South Park nailed it).
- jhuckestein 13y agoI always play with a Rando Calrissian and he won the last 3 out of 3 games. It's quite intriguing actually
- tantalor 13y agoThis type of a joke is a snowclone. See also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowclone http://snowclones.org/ http://snowclones.org/
- jlgreco 13y agoThe last time automated joke generation was discussed on HN, I learned that a large, or at least vocal, amount of people consider it to the be responsibility of anybody running automatic joke generation software to supervise the software to ensure that no truly offensive jokes are inadvertently generated. I don't agree that such a responsibility exists, but it is probably worth keeping in mind that others do if you are interested in surfacing computer generated content like this. I would be wary of surfacing it without some form of auditing.
- VladRussian2 13y agointeresting ethical question - one is supposedly responsible for behavior of his automated tool/robot. If that automated tool is able to build and initiate execution of another, more complex (well big "if" of course here) automated tool ... at what level of complexity of separation the original responsibility ends, if any.
- jlgreco 13y agoI assume (for people who think a human is responsible for the first bot) the responsibility always lies with the human, no matter how many bot are involved. I say this simply because nobody is really interested in being mad and yelling at a bot. Whether or not the human deserves the blame is a tricky question, but I think in practice they will get it regardless.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoHow would you even build a bot to build a joke-bot? Genetic algorithms?
- peter-fogg 13y agoChances are any genetic algorithm would be impractical due to the necessity of using a human as a fitness function. Unless you could create a neural network to classify jokes as funny or not... which immediately suggests to me an AI version of that standup comedy competition. Hm; maybe I have a new side project.
- newtover 13y agoThe MT Summit's Program contains an eye-catcher as well: Modeling Hip Hop Challenge-Response Lyrics as Machine Translation (http://www.mtsummit2013.info/programme.asp http://www.mtsummit2013.info/programme.asp)
- ffk 13y agoThis just in! Computers have no sense of humor! ;)
- tomphoolery 13y agowe must apply these to memes IMMEDIATELY!
- cpeterso 13y agoI heard a story on NPR about an IBM research group developing an AI system to generate new recipes. The system analyzed existing recipes and knew about the biochemistry of human taste. I can't find an online reference.
- Someone 13y agohttp://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/creating-recipes-with-artificial-intelligence http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/creating-recipes... (for me, that was Google's top link for 'ibm ai recipe generation') And it comes with a joke in the comments: Q: So, what would I use my supercomputer for? A: Well . . . , you could keep your recipes on there. [for those too young to know: putting your recipes in a database was _the_ example mentioned when people asked what they could use a home computer for. Utterly impractical, as loading your 20 recipes from cassette would take ages a d would exhaust your computer's memory. Also, nobody had a television in the kitchen, and you needed one to use that home computer]
- cpeterso 13y agoThanks! The "ai" keyword was the key. I had tried "ibm recipe generation" and "ibm recipe generator", but the results were just links about WSDL or PRNGs. :)
- biesnecker 13y agoIsn't this how the AI in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress gets started?
- mooreds 13y agoI'm glad someone mentioned this!
- zindlerb 13y agoContent like this is what makes HN great. Very interesting read.
- jes5199 13y agoThey chose not to put an example joke in the abstract?
- emiliobumachar 13y agoI suppose it's hard enough to be taken seriously when your research topic is jokes.
- liotier 13y agoIn Soviet Russia, unsupervised jokes generate big data !
- pvnick 13y agoI've been interested in something like this ever since I saw Monty Python's The Funniest Joke in the World [1]. Tldr, it's a joke so funny, that it literally kills you after you hear it. I wonder what to what limit a humor generation algorithm could diverge. Could it be a joke funnier than anything anybody's ever seen? [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gpjk_MaCGM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gpjk_MaCGM
- coldcode 13y agoI fail to see the humor in this.