# Towards Conversational Humor Analysis and Design

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.00536 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00536/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 2 of its 13 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Feb 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Strategies for Structuring Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01109/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Let's Think Outside the Box: Exploring Leap-of-Thought in Large Language Models with Creative Humor Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02439/) (2023)
- [Innovative Thinking, Infinite Humor: Humor Research of Large Language Models through Structured Thought Leaps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10370/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Well-defined jokes can be divided neatly into a setup and a punchline. While most works on humor today talk about a joke as a whole, the idea of generating punchlines to a setup has applications in conversational humor, where funny remarks usually occur with a non-funny context. Thus, this paper is based around two core concepts: Classification and the Generation of a punchline from a particular setup based on the Incongruity Theory. We first implement a feature-based machine learning model to classify humor. For humor generation, we use a neural model, and then merge the classical rule-based approaches with the neural approach to create a hybrid model. The idea behind being: combining insights gained from other tasks with the setup-punchline model and thus applying it to existing text generation approaches. We then use and compare our model with human written jokes with the help of human evaluators in a double-blind study.