The knowledge base, called an ontology, represents an innovative, and more complex approach, said Christian Hemplemann, chief scientific officer at Hakia, an Internet search engine company.
Hakia conducts searches based on meaning, instead of popularity of key words or phrases. More popular approaches rely on statistics, which analyzes millions of words in a text and looks at what words occur frequently around other words.
For example, "bank" can mean a financial institution or land beside a river. Words such as "teller," "check" and "account" indicate financial institution, while "fish," "rapids" and "water" indicate land beside a river.
With an ontology, the researchers must build a database that includes all of the things and events in a given world — in this case, the world of children's jokes — and how they relate to each other. The relationships are categorized in a hierarchical structural from general to a more precise meaning.
"Humor is a very specific form of meaning that's related to a specific emotional response in humans that occurs in specific social situations," said Hemplemann. "If you understand how to do it artificially, that may give you an idea of how it works for the real thing."
To test the computer's understanding, Taylor enters text into the system and then lets the program tell her if it thinks the text is a joke or not. See what you think:
Mother to boy: "Johnny, you've been working in the garden a lot this summer."
Boy: "I know. My teacher told me to weed a lot."
Because "weed" sounds similar to "read," the program picks up on the wordplay and flags the text as a joke.
Taylor and Mazlack are currently working to build the knowledge base for the computer so that it can eventually recognize more sophisticated jokes. And one day, it may even be able to generate jokes of its own.
Getting a computer to recognize whether or not a joke is funny is a whole different matter.
Related Links:
Hakia Search Engine
University of Cincinnati's Applied Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
