Mayank Goel supervised by Dr. Radhika Mamidi received his Master of Science – Dual Degree in Computational Linguistics (CL). Here’s a summary of his research work on Humor Generation and Analysis:
This thesis explores and analyzes humor generation through several methods. This thesis introduces an approach to automated joke generation that leverages a novel hybrid model combining template extraction and infilling. Recognizing the inherent structure and unpredictability in humor, this work pioneers a method that extracts templates from existing jokes and subsequently infills these templates with new content, guided by state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques available at the time of research. Specifically, the thesis accomplishes three main objectives: Firstly, it develops an automated system for joke generation that innovatively combines template extraction with a deep learning approach for content infilling, ensuring both the preservation of joke structure and the introduction of novelty. This approach uses a rule-based method to extract a template from a joke and then infills it using BERT. Secondly, it extends the base model by incorporating advancements in language models and natural language processing to enhance the flexibility and quality of generated jokes, broadening the scope of humor that the system can produce. This approach uses a novel strategy to identify semantically salient words, and uses LLMs on top of earlier models for the infilling. Lastly, the thesis explores a distinct avenue in humor generation by employing conversational prompts within a conversational AI framework with GPT-4, the SOTA at the time of presentation. This method not only diversifies the ways in which humor can be generated but also reflects on the potential of conversational AI to contribute creatively to the domain of humor. Through rigorous evaluation, this work demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed methods in generating humor that is coherent, contextually appropriate, and, most importantly, funny. This research not only contributes a novel technique to the field of computational humor but also opens up new pathways for future exploration in automated joke generation and the creative capacities of AI.
September 2024