Humor with backgrounded incongruity: Does more required suspension of disbelief affect humor perception?

Humorous stimuli, like jokes and cartoons, are assumed to contain a central incongruity in a specific constellation of opposition and overlap that is essential to their humorousness. Many stimuli also contain additional incongruities that the audience usually overlooks, but that may be needed to create the setup for the main incongruity, e.g., animals that talk, space aliens, an Italian, an American, and a Russian sharing a language. Two of the studies described in the present paper investigated the effect of such backgrounded incongruities by removing them from a set of jokes and cartoons and testing how this affects humor processing and appreciation. A third study investigated whether the elimination of a backgrounded incongruity influences the position of a humorous stimulus on the incongruity-resolution and nonsense humor continuum. Methods included computer-based stimulus rating and self-explanations by the participants. The results suggested that backgrounded incongruities influence humor appreciation because their elimination leads to lower funniness and higher aversion. Furthermore, the backgrounded incongruities contribute strongly to the perceived absurdity of a joke. When they are removed, the jokes are perceived less to be nonsense humor but more as incongruity-resolution humo

Natural Language Watermarking and Tamperproofing

Two main results in the area of information hiding in natural language text are presented. A semantically-based scheme dramatically improves the information-hiding capacity of any text through two techniques: (i) modifying the granularity of meaning of individual sentences, whereas our own previous scheme kept the granularity fixed, and (ii) halving the number of sentences affected by the watermark. No longer a "long text, short watermark" approach, it now makes it possible to watermark short texts like wire agency reports. Using both the above-mentioned semantic marking scheme and our previous syntactically-based method hides information in a way that reveals any non-trivial tampering with the text (while re-formatting is not considered to be tampering---the problem would be solved trivially otherwise by hiding a hash of the text) with a probability 1--2 , n being its number of sentences and a small positive integer based on the extent of co-referencing

Genome-wide association analysis of genetic generalized epilepsies implicates susceptibility loci at 1q43, 2p16.1, 2q22.3 and 17q21.32

Genetic generalized epilepsies (GGEs) have a lifetime prevalence of 0.3% and account for 20-30% of all epilepsies. Despite their high heritability of 80%, the genetic factors predisposing to GGEs remain elusive. To identify susceptibility variants shared across common GGE syndromes, we carried out a two-stage genome-wide association study (GWAS) including 3020 patients with GGEs and 3954 controls of European ancestry. To dissect out syndrome-related variants, we also explored two distinct GGE subgroups comprising 1434 patients with genetic absence epilepsies (GAEs) and 1134 patients with juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME). Joint Stage-1 and 2 analyses revealed genome-wide significant associations for GGEs at 2p16.1 (rs13026414, Pmeta = 2.5 × 10−9, OR[T] = 0.81) and 17q21.32 (rs72823592, Pmeta = 9.3 × 10−9, OR[A] = 0.77). The search for syndrome-related susceptibility alleles identified significant associations for GAEs at 2q22.3 (rs10496964, Pmeta = 9.1 × 10−9, OR[T] = 0.68) and at 1q43 for JME (rs12059546, Pmeta = 4.1 × 10−8, OR[G] = 1.42). Suggestive evidence for an association with GGEs was found in the region 2q24.3 (rs11890028, Pmeta = 4.0 × 10−6) nearby the SCN1A gene, which is currently the gene with the largest number of known epilepsy-related mutations. The associated regions harbor high-ranking candidate genes: CHRM3 at 1q43, VRK2 at 2p16.1, ZEB2 at 2q22.3, SCN1A at 2q24.3 and PNPO at 17q21.32. Further replication efforts are necessary to elucidate whether these positional candidate genes contribute to the heritability of the common GGE syndrome

Humor in the teaching of writing: A microethnographic approach

This paper presents the content of a critical thinking and writing course, along with similar courses derived from it, designed around the topic of humor and culminating in a microethnographic investigation of humor in students’ lives. The aims of the paper are threefold: to offer a general rationale for using humor in the writing classroom; to illustrate different types of potentials and dangers of such an approach; and to suggest extensions of the findings to the second-language writing classroom. The paper offers texts, writing prompts, and activities for instructors teaching classes that focus on the writing process in a first or second language

Paronomasic puns: Target recoverability towards automatic generation

The aim of this dissertation is to create a theory to model the factors, prominently, but not exclusively the phonological similarity, important in imperfect punning and to outline the implementation of this measure for the evaluation of possible imperfect puns given an input word and a set of possible target words. Imperfect, heterophonic, or paronomasic, puns differ from perfect, homophonic puns in that the target is different in sound from the pun. While homophonic puns are interesting for the linguist primarily with respect to their semantics, heterophonic puns present a research issue also to the phonologist, because they use one of two similar sound sequences to stand for both meanings associated with them, for example, bang to denote a noise as well as a financial institution. The specific question here is, how much contrast is possible between the pun and its target to make the latter recoverable, in terms of the semantics, phonology, and syntax of the pun-target pair and its context. The theoretical framework for the phonological part of this project is inspired by a recent version of Optimality Theory (OT), adopted in phonology, because it is able to describe the occurrence of related forms through a selection process from among possible candidate forms more appropriately than derivational approaches can by way of rules operating on one input form and yielding one output form. Taking more parameters—both phonological and syntactic—into account than previous studies, this project is intended to describe the linguistics of the imperfect pun in terms of a set of hierarchies of constraints weighing the differences found between the puns and targets of a sample corpus. Based on this measure, I will outline a computational implementation of the results that can evaluate an input word with respect to a set of existing English words from a machine-readable dictionary. The basic idea is to assign values to constraint violations and combinations thereof and then adding up the “penalty” for each violation in which a possible target does not conform to the pun

3 WD meets GTVH: Breaking the ground for interdisciplinary humor research

The present paper describes an interdisciplinary effort, in which results based on the same material, but analyzed with tools from two different disciplines are brought together for mutual evaluation. The set of 70 jokes and cartoons from the 3 WD (Ruch 1995), which has been extensively studied psychologically for its affective properties, is analyzed linguistically for its internal morphology based on the General Theory of Verbal Humor— GTVH (Attardo and Raskin 1991). The correlations between the stimulus properties and their effects are discussed, as well as the relevance of these results for the respective theories and the disciplines that use them. Additional emphasis is placed on highlighting the problems and considerable benefits of such interdisciplinary research as the most apt approach to complex phenomena like humor. The results show that there is indeed significant overlap between stimulus properties as they can be distinguished linguistically and affective responses as they can be identified psychologically. Of the six GTVH categories, it is primarily script opposition, narrative structure, target, and logical mechanism that contribute to the separation of the three humor types with respect to effects on recipients. The results also suggest that initial and residual incongruity, as operationalized with the GTVH, are central cognitive aspects of humor with an impact on affective factors and, consequently, their distinction. While this may appear to be commonsensical results, their scientific reproduction is a major step forward, in this case for humor research