For example, two knock-knock punch lines provided by the researchers that the robot can recognize include "Dismay who? Dismay not be a funny joke," and "Police who? Police tell me some Knock Knock jokes." Trust us: this robot is not going to understand high-level humor for some time.
#KNOCKKNOCK BIZ SOFTWARE#
According to the researchers, the software needs to be able to understand that certain words sound somewhat similar to each other, and therefore the meaning could change drastically. The software recognizes humor by processing the words used in the joke and comparing it with a vocabulary database, which must be created by a world-wise human being. "The idea is to be able to recognize jokes that are based on phonological similarity of words." Advertisement
"The 'robot' is just a software program that still needs a lot of work," says Taylor. They reported on their progress with the project at the American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference in Vancouver this week, and while they feel they have made great progress so far, they feel that they have a long way to go. That's what UC doctoral student Julia Taylor and professor Larry Mazlack have discovered in their project on data mining.
"You need to know a lot to 'get' humor-a computer does not find it easy." "The ability to appreciate humor is an enormous increment in subtlety," said researcher Tom Mantei from the University of Cincinnati's College of Engineering in a statement. Well, Woz may have a newly-interested audience for his hilarious joke-telling appearances, because researchers at the University of Cincinnati have developed a robot that is capable of recognizing simple humor made up of wordplay and bad puns. This is the kind of humor we're used to hearing from kids, colleagues who think they are funnier than they really are, and the likes of Steve Wozniak.