Joke-writing software? Sorta…

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on August 24th, 2006

A sweet story made nearly every newspaper in the world yesterday. A gang of eggheads got together to improve the quality of the lives of some rather unfortunate children:

Researchers from three Scottish universities have developed a speech software package which will allow children who cannot speak to crack jokes – by computer.

The scientists at Aberdeen, Dundee and Edinburgh universities believe humour can be used to help non-speaking children learn to use language more effectively.

They have adapted computer speech technology made famous by physicist Stephen Hawking to enable children who speak using computerised aids to construct and tell jokes.

Apparently, the logic goes, as kids, we all use humor to play with the language. This type of experimentation leads to greater fluency later on, especially when compared to the rare child who doesn’t mess around with puns and parodies– like kids who flat-out can’t speak.

So, some of these kids– the ones using the Hawking device to communicate– now have this software which essentially enables them to quickly look up words, find similar words, locate homonyms, etc. They now have a means to locate the building blocks of rudimentary gags, puns… jokes.

24 hours later, here’s the first two grafs of (inexplicably popular) news website Ananova’s take on the story, under the headline, “Computer that can tell jokes”:

A new computer software program has been developed that can tell jokes.

The software is known as The System to Augment Non-speakers’ Dialogue Using Puns (Standup).The programme allows the youngsters to generate puns, helping them overcome language barriers.

What is up with Ananova? Sounds like it’s being run by a former American medium-size market local TV news GM! Sounds like all us standup comics are about to be replaced. Fear not– once every decade or so, a scientist tries to get a computer to write humor. It never works.

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