An Analysis of the Impact of Ambiguity on Automatic Humour Recognition

摘要

One of the most amazing characteristics that defines the human being is humour. Its analysis implies a set of subjective and fuzzy factors, such as the linguistic, psychological or sociological variables that produce it. This is one of the reasons why its automatic processing seems to be not straightforward. However, recent researches in the Natural Language Processing area have shown that humour can automatically be generated and recognised with success. On the basis of those achievements, in this study we present the experiments we have carried out on a collection of Italian texts in order to investigate how to characterize humour through the study of the ambiguity, especially with respect to mor-phosyntactic and syntactic ambiguity. The results we have obtained show that it is possible to differentiate humorous from non humorous data through features like perplexity or sentence complexity.