Examples of humorous and sometimes awkward autocorrect substitutions happen all the time. Typing ‘funny autocorrect’ into Google brings up page upon page of examples where phones seem to have a mind of their own.

A group of researchers at the University of Helsinki, under the lead of Professor Hannu Toivonen, have been examining word substitution and sentence formation, to see the extent to which they can implement a completely automatic form of humour generation. The results have been published online in the in the journal Natural Language Engineering.

Basing the experiment on the ideas and methods of computational humour explored by Alessandro Valitutti for several years, the researchers worked with short length text messages changing one word to another one, turning the text to a pun, possibly using a taboo word. By isolating and manipulating the main components of such pun-based texts, they were able to generate humorous texts in a more controllable way.

For example, it was proved that replacing a word at the end of the sentence surprised recipients, contributing to the humorous effect. They also proved that word replacement is funnier if the word is phonetically similar to the original word and when the word is a “humorously inappropriate” taboo word.

The experiment involved over 70,000 assessments in total, and used crowd sourcing to test funniness of the texts. This is the largest experiment that Professor Toivonen knows of related to this field of research.

How funny?

People were asked to assess individual messages for their funniness on a scale of 0 to 4 with 0 indicating the text wasn’t funny. And comedians can sigh with relief – the initial median score from the research was just 0.55, indicating that on average the text can hardly be called funny. But by following a combination of rules, this median increased by 67% showing that by inserting certain criteria could impact upon how funny the text message was.

Does this mean that in the future people will ‘rofl’ (roll on the floor laughing) in response to a funny quip or witty banter made by a phone?

Professor Toivonen sees a future where programs will be able to generate humorous automated responses and sentences:

“Some of the first applications of this type of research are likely to be seen in the automated production of funny marketing messages and help with creative writing. But who knows, maybe phones will one day be intelligent enough to make you laugh.”

Read the article ‘Computational generation and dissection of lexical replacement humor’ online in the journal Natural Language Engineering – please note that the article contains language that some may find offensive.

5 of the funniest texts*

*There were funnier texts but due to offensive language we were not able to publish them on this blog