'Robots with sense of humour'

Washington, Aug 2: Remember Robin Williams from the movie the Bi-Centennial Man, where he plays a robotic man-servant to Sam Neil and does every household work.

He learns when to laugh at a joke and when not to; he learns table manners and even wears a tuxedo at Sam Neil's daughter's wedding. But then in the end he also earns his pay, his freedom and ultimately dies like a normal human being.

Now all that could soon become a reality, at least the ability to laugh at a joke, what with researchers at University of Cincinnati in Ohio having built a computer program or "bot" that promises to lend a sense of humour to physical robots acting as human companions or helpers.

To teach the program to spot jokes, Julia Taylor and Lawrence Mazlack first gave 'bot' a database of words, extracted from a children's dictionary to keep things simple, and then supplied examples of how words can be related to one another in different ways to create different meanings.

When presented with a new passage, the program uses that knowledge to work out how those new words relate to each other and what they likely mean. When it finds a word that doesn't seem to fit with its surroundings, it searches a digital pronunciation guide for similar-sounding words. If any of those words fits in better with the rest of the sentence, it flags the passage as a joke.

The end result is that 'bot' "gets" jokes that turn on a simple pun.

However, there are still some puns that 'bot' misses. And of course, there are many jokes that aren't based on puns, which the 'bot' doesn't get, said Taylor.

Taylor is now working to personalise 'bot's' sense of humour by flagging certain links between words as either funny or not, depending on the experiences of people it might converse with.

The research was presented at the American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference in Vancouver, Canada, and appears in the August 4 issue of New Scientist magazine.

ANI>