Preface to Computational Humor 2012

Like its predecessors in 1996 (University of Twente, the Netherlands) and 2002 (ITC-irst, Trento, Italy), this Third International Workshop on Computational Humor (IWCH 2012) focusses on the possibility to find algorithms that allow understanding and generation of humor. There is the general aim of modeling humor, and if we can do that, it will provide us with lots of information about our cognitive abilities in general, such as reasoning, remembering, understanding situations, and understanding conversational partners. But it also provides us with information about being creative, making associations, storytelling and language use. Many more subtleties in face-to-face and multiparty interaction can be added, such as using humor to persuade and dominate, to soften or avoid a face threatening act, to ease a tense situation or to establish a friendly or romantic relationship. One issue to consider is: when is a humorous act appropriate

Enriching videos with light semantics

This paper describes an ongoing prototypical framework to annotate and retrieve web videos with light semantics. The proposed framework reuses many existing vocabularies along with a video model. The knowledge is captured from three different information spaces (media content, context, document). We also describe ways to extract the semantic content descriptions from the existing usergenerated content using multiple approaches of linguistic processing and Named Entity Recognition, which are later identified with DBpedia resources to establish meanings for the tags. Finally, the implemented prototype is described with multiple search interfaces and retrieval processes. Evaluation on semantic enrichment shows a considerable (50% of videos) improvement in content description

Patterns of implicit and non-follower retweet propagation: investigating the role of applications and hashtags

Existing literature on retweets seems to focus mainly on retweets created using explicit, formal retweeting mechanisms, such as Twitter's own native retweet function, and the prefixing of the terms 'RT' or 'via' in front of copied tweets. However, retweets can also be made using implicit, informal mechanisms. These include tweet replies and other mechanisms, which use neither the native nor RT/via mechanisms, but their content and timelines suggest the likelihood of being a retweet. Moreover, retweets can also occur with or without a defined follower/following network path between a tweet originator and a retweeter. This paper presents an initial taxonomy of propagation based on seven different ways a tweet may spread: native, native non-follower, RT/Via, RT/Via non-follower, replies, non-follower replies and other implicit 'retweets'. An experiment has examined this new model, by investigating where tweets containing URLs from the domains of online petitions, charity fundraisers, news portals, and YouTube videos can be classified into the seven different categories. When including other implicit 'retweets', more than 50% of all the retweets found across all four domains were classified as implicit retweets, while more than 79% of all retweets were made by non-followers. More work needs to be done on the composition of other implicit 'retweets'. Initial investigations found hashtags in 99-100% of these tweets, suggesting that retweeting using conventional mechanisms may not be the main method that URLs get propagated across microblogs

A linked data-driven & service-oriented architecture for sharing educational resources

The two fundamental aims of managing educational resources are to enable resources to be reusable and interoperable and to enable Web-scale sharing of resources across learning communities. Currently, a variety of approaches have been proposed to expose and manage educational resources and their metadata on the Web. These are usually based on heterogeneous metadata standards and schemas, such as IEEE LOM or ADL SCORM, and diverse repository interfaces such as OAI-PMH or SQI. Also, there is still a lack of usage of controlled vocabularies and available data sets that could replace the widespread use of unstructured text for describing resources. On the other hand, the Linked Data approach has proven that it offers a set of successful principles that have the potential to alleviate the aforementioned issues. In this paper, we introduce an architecture and prototype which is fundamentally based on (a) Linked Data principles and (b) Service-orientation to resolve the integration issues for sharing educational resources