Sympathetic Magic in A.I. and the Humanities

Tony Veale(Associate Professor, University College Dublin)

Much of what we consider humorous is a perishable commodity. As the shifting plates of the Zeitgeist create new opportunities for humour in one domain of human experience, other opportunities dry up or cease to be topical. To deploy automated humour generation in a dynamic environment, we shall need to build flexible frameworks that allow designers to respond quickly to changing norms and topical new targets for wit. We consider Twitter to be such an environment, and explore the rapid development of new humour generators by transferring a reusable sense of humour from one domain-specific generator to another. We articulate what it means for a computer program to have a sense of humour in the first place, before we distinguish between those aspects that are generic and reusable from those that are bespoke and tied to a specific goal.

Key words：Twitter, Twitterbot, Metaphor, Reuse, Irony, Social Networks, Wit.