US researchers develop sense of humour software

It's a punishing routine and that's no joke

Scientists at a US universities are developing software that they believe in the future could give computers or robots a sense of humour.

The computer program or bot being developed by Julia Taylor and Lawrence Mazlack of the University of Cincinnati in Ohio has been taught to 'get' simple puns.

According to New Scientist, the researchers input a database of simple words taken from a children's dictionary. They then supplied examples of how words can be related to one another in different ways to create different meanings.

When presented with a new passage, the program uses that knowledge to work out how those new words relate to each other and what they likely mean. When it finds a word that doesn't seem to fit with its surroundings, it searches a digital pronunciation guide for similar-sounding words.

If any of those words fits in better with the rest of the sentence, it flags the passage as a joke. Taylor, who presented the program at the American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference in Vancouver, Canada, last week said that it still misses some puns.

Neither is the program advanced enough yet to make the leap to less  punishing scenarios and understand jokes that are not based on this type of humour.

She is now working on a way to 'personalise' the bot's sense of humour by highlighting certain links between words as being either funny or not, depending on the experiences of people the bot might converse with.