Technologies That Make You Smile: Adding Humor to Text-Based Applications

Natural language's creative genres are traditionally considered to be outside the scope of computational modeling. Computational linguists have paid little attention to humor in particular because it is puzzling by nature. However, given the importance of humor in our daily lives and computers in our work and entertainment, studies related to computational humor will become increasingly significant in fields such as human-computer interaction, intelligent interactive entertainment, and computer-assisted education. In this article, we explore computational approaches' applicability to the recognition and use of verbally expressed humor. Particularly, we focus on three important research questions related to this problem: Can we automatically gather large collections of humorous texts? Can we automatically recognize humor in text? And can we automatically insert humorous add-ons into existing applications?