Trying to teach computers to tell jokes brings results that are more laughable than funny. Linguists and computer scientists say machines just don't get humor.
FILE - This Monday, Aug. 1, 2016 file photo shows the humanoid robot "Alter" on display at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo. Understanding humor may be one of the last things that separates humans from ever smarter machines, computer scientists and linguists say. Alexa and Siri can tell jokes mined from a humor database, but they just don’t get them.
And when it comes to humor, the people who study it — sometimes until all laughs are beaten out of it — say context is key. Even expert linguists have trouble explaining humor, said Tristan Miller, a computer scientist and linguist at Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany. “I like to believe that there is something very innately human about what makes something funny,” Bishop said.
“They get them — sort of,” Rayz said. “Even if we look at puns, most of the puns require huge amounts of background.”Rayz has spent 15 years trying to get computers to understand humor, and at times the results were, well, laughable. She recalled a time she gave the computer two different groups of sentences. Some were jokes. Some were not. The computer classified something as a joke that people thought wasn’t a joke.
“We know that humor — at least good humor — relies on nuance and on timing,” Slonim said. “And these are very hard to decipher by an automatic system.”
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