Logic and reasoning in jokes

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

A closer look at creativity as search

Publisher PD

The STANDUP 2 Interactive Riddle Builder

Publisher PD

Using genetic algorithms to create meaningful poetic text

Work carried out when all authors were at the University of Edinburgh.Peer reviewedPostprin

An Implementation of a Flexible Author-Reviewer Model of Generation using Genetic Algorithms

PACLIC / The University of the Philippines Visayas Cebu College Cebu City, Philippines / November 20-22, 200

Completeness Conditions for Mixed Strategy Bidirectional Parsing

It has been suggested that, in certain circumstances, it might be useful for a grammar-writer to annotate which rules are to be used bottom-up and which are to be used top-down within a parser, using a bidirectional variant of the active chart parsing technique. The formal properties of such systems have not been fully explored. One limitation of this mixed strategy technique is that certain annotations of rules can lead to incompleteness; that is, there may be valid analyses of the input string which cannot be found by the parser. We formalise a fairly natural notion of mixed strategy bidirectional parsing for context free grammars, in which one or more symbols within a rule may be annotated as ``triggers'' so that the rule is either top-down (triggered from its left-hand side), or bottom-up (triggered from element(s) of its right-hand side). We define a decidable property of annotated grammars, such that any grammar with this property is provably complete. There are, however, some complete annotations of grammars which fall outside this decidable class. We show that membership of this wider class is undecidable. These results suggest that the mixed strategy approach is of rather limited usefulness, regardless of whether it is empirically efficient or not

Developing the Incongruity-Resolution Theory

The idea of incongruity-resolution has frequently been suggested as an account of many types of joke. However, there is no precise statement either of this ``theory'' nor of its main concepts (incongruity and resolution), and different authors may disagree on details. We concentrate on two particular variants and attempt to clarify what would be needed to make these into computational models

Describing Verbally Expressed Humour

Proceedings of AISB Symposium on Creative and Cultural Aspects and Applications of AI and Cognitive ScienceIn pursuit of the long-term goal of developing a general theory of humour, it is reasonable to study certain limited forms of humorous artefact in detail. One obvious class of humour to consider is verbally expressed humour, and in particular jokes. We propose a methodology for exploring this subarea. The central idea is to devise detailed symbolic descriptions of the internal linguistic structure of classes of jokes, at a suitable level of abstraction. These descriptions are intended to make explicit the semantic and pragmatic factors (broadly interpreted) that are relevant to the humorous effect of the subclass of joke in question, and also to contribute an accumulation of analysed data over which more general theorising may occur. An analogy is drawn with established practice in linguistics