ABSTRACT
Computational treatments of humor attract attention from lay audiences practically every day. With artificial intelligence (AI) celebrating its 60th anniversary, questions arise of when (not even if) a computer will be able to understand humor. These questions open up interesting opportunities, but also attract people who are new to humor research to create programs that “should” add to the AI studies. Such programs typically use existing (recent) methods of AI and port them, as is, into this new field of research. Other approaches come from researchers from the humor research community who are familiar with the challenges of studying humor and its forms and, when building a system model, a well-defined (and, hopefully, understood) area of humor, use appropriate methodologies for the task, whether these methodologies are new (rarely) or old. The theories of humor themselves could be “computationalized” as well, but that task involves a collaboration of researchers from multiple disciplines, as humor itself is a multidisciplinary field (Ritchie, 2001).
