Knock, Knock...

Just what I need. A bot with attitude. Hey, if I wanted smart aleck responses, all I have to do is drop by the office from time to time. Or call up the boss.

But that's not good enough for Julia Taylor and Larry Mazlack who have unveiled a bot that recognizes jokes. Taylor, a doctoral student at the University of Cincinnati, is studying data mining , while Mazlack is the coordinator of the Applied Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and coordinator of the Data and Knowledge Management research group. Taylor focuses on humor in robots.

"This work has a relationship to 'Sociable Computing,'" says Mazlack. "Currently, computers are often difficult to communicate with, to use and to apply to solving problems that are informally stated." Taylor adds that "The idea is to be able to recognize jokes that are based on phonological similarity of words."

The program can in fact recognize jokes, but only when the necessary background and world knowledge are provided, she goes on to say. "The ontology that provides this knowledge is a work-in-progress at this stage. So, the software is far from being finished, but does produce some results.”

Taylor has been training the bot using knock-knock jokes that generally turn on people’s names. Knee-slappers like:

Knock, Knock
Who is there?
Wendy
Wendy who?
Wendy last time you took a bath?

"Part of the difficulty lies with the formality that computers and people need to use to interact with each other," says Mazlack. "A critical aspect in achieving sociable computing is being able to informally communicate in a human language with computers. Computationally handling humor is critical to being able to conduct an informal dialogue with a computer; Julia Taylor is making good progress in advancing knowledge in this area -- other people in my lab are working on different aspects of less formal ways of using computers."

Okay, try the bot out on this one (which, to the best of my knowledge, is a Dr. Dobb's Original):

Knock, Knock
Who is there?
Dr. Who

Get it? And you wonder why they don't want me to hang around the office.

Posted by Jon Erickson at 03:34 PM  Permalink