LEVELS OF SOPHISTICATION OF HUMOR INTELLIGENT AGENTS
Victor Raskin and Katrina E. Triezenberg
Natural Language Processing Laboratory
Purdue University
W. Lafayette, IN 47907 USA
{vraskin, kattriez}@purdue.edu
Introduction/Abstract
The idea of intelligent (embodied) agents for humor pioneered by Nijholt (2001, 2002)
and Stock (1996; see also the fundamental Stock and Strapparava, 2002) has had an
impressive start but, as with all really interesting intelligent agent projects, is far from
complete implementation. Mindful of all the difficulties and obstacles on the way to full
implementation, most but not all related to AI and NLP issues, this paper attempts to
explore one particular aspect of such implementation, namely, levels of sophistication.
This aspect is of great concern to software developers and manufacturers because of the
customer acceptance factor (see Raskin 2002 on the crippling effect of customer nonacceptance of information assurance and security products on the world-wide ability to
protect computer systems). The question is whether, given an implemented humor
intelligent agent (HIA), the customer will find the agent useful, interesting, and
stimulating enough to purchase after a trial use and to continue using for a long time, thus
spreading the good word about the product. To keep a human interlocutor interested
another human has to be two not entirely unrelated things:
• non-repetitive, innovative, creative, capable of renewing the interlocutor’s interest,
and
• capable of communication at or slightly above the interlocutor’s level of
sophistication.
While the first of the two features is certainly deserving of investigation, this paper
focuses on the second. The human partner (or a HIA), functioning at a lower level, will
strike the user as uninteresting and dumb. The one, functioning at a higher level, will be
seen as cryptic, arrogant, and out of whack. A good HIA should have a built-in ability to
function at a pre-selected level, modify it appropriately, and, if possible, do it
automatically.
The paper will first review briefly and somewhat critically the first co-author’s previously
held views on sophistication in humor and, by transference, beyond.
What Is Sophistication?
When President Clinton asked the Grand Jury interrogator to define for him what is was
[is, in the original present tense] it was quite sophisticated. It was mocked by the media
pundits as something obvious, and that was typically unsophisticated of them. Is then
sophisticated an antonym of obvious. Raskin (2001) suggested the following traits
associated with sophistication:
• rare
• expensive
• not easily available
• not well known
• complex
• non-naive, knowledgeable, experience-related
• subtle, refined
A few more can be easily added to the list:
• non-obvious
• prestigious
• enviable
• desirable
• unexpected.
Any one or more of these features can be defeated with regard to this or that sophisticated
phenomenon, so one sophisticated thing may have only Wittgenstein’s family
resemblance relationship with another, making sophistication an evasive moving target.
In humor, anecdotal evidence suggests that it is the brief, cryptic, non-obvious jokes that
strike hearers as sophisticated. Thus, the famous sparrow joke:
What is the difference between the sparrow? No difference whatsoever. Both halves of the sparrow
are perfectly identical. Especially the left half.
stretch and overload many hearers’ comprehensive powers from the very first sentence
(“between the sparrow and what?”). One plausible hypothesis is that sophistication
requires work, an intellectual effort, reconstruction of non-trivial missing links, resulting
in more sophisticated logical mechanism for the joke (see Raskin 1988, 1990; Attardo
and Raskin 1991; Attardo, Hempelmann, and di Maio 2002).
However, a persistent trait associated with sophistication is prestige. Raskin (1988, and
especially 1990) ranted against prestige-based sophistication as a much less interesting
phenomenon on grounds of its seeming arbitrariness and less intellectual value than
logic-reconstruction-based sophistication. Raskin (2001) was much more moderate on the
subject, and at least one psychological school of thought, fetchingly called “terror
management theory” (Greenberg et al. 1986) attempts to lend some systematicity to the
societal choices of what is considered prestigious (such as—not their examples—wine
rather than beer, Marcel Proust rather than Danielle Steele, “69” rather than the
missionary position, Michel Cluizel rather than Godiva) by positing that given a choice
between two items, the prestigious choice is the one that will be most memorable within
the chooser’s culture —therefore prestigious items are often taken from foreign cultures,
known for their accomplishments in the domain, such as French for ingestibles.
The bare bones of Terror Management Theory are that as the only self-aware animals,
humans are the only animals who can foresee their own deaths. This thought is too
terrifying for them to live under, and so they create Culture, with all its not-strictlynecessary occupations, in order to distract themselves from it. Making oneself memorable
within a culture, they reason, is a form of immortality—and therefore actions that are
remembered and approved of by the culture are prestigious.
Threshold of Triviality
Directly related to the concept of sophistication is the individual feature of a
speaker/thinker determining what he/she unconsciously considers obvious and not worth
stating. For lack of a better term and having failed to find any literature on the subject,
the term ‘threshold of triviality’ (TT) is used here, waiting to be replaced by a more
suitable term, if and when discovered. Thus, TTS1 > TTS2, when addressing somebody in
their household about to go out on a winter day:
S1: It is freezing.
S2: It is freezing outside. You need more layers of clothing when the temperature is low. So put
on your coat, hat, and gloves.
The sophisticated S1 assumes that the hearer will interpret the remark as implying
everything in S2’s version and refuses to state the obvious. TT is probably the first and
earliest encounter most people have with sophistication, and their reaction to a difference
in TT levels is exactly the same as described above for levels of sophistication: negative
when different between the interlocutors.
HIAs’ Levels of Sophistication
The minimal effort at stratifying sophistication may involve even a HIA entirely lacking
the creativity feature mentioned above. Thus, the earliest application, implemented at
IRST in 2000, offered an e-mail user to tell a joke appropriate to the text of an in- or
outgoing message, and it could easily be complemented with the Jester-type clusterstatistical measure based on the user’s ranking of the jokes, resulting in the user’s being
told the jokes he or she likes.
The low TT level of an HIA would be a very negative factor, leading very soon to its
rejection by the user. A sophistication-mode selector by the user is one remedy for this
situation. It would be much more interesting to design a sophistication-level sensor and
self-switcher model for HIAs. Practically, it probably means the development of several
separate HIA, with alternative repertoires, creative or databased, for different levels of
sophistication and bundling them together.
Related both to the creativity and self-renewal of HIAs to maintain the user’s interest
(sounds suspiciously like marriage counseling), they must obtain updates and upgrades
from an online source letting them download new jokes, modules, and newly prestigious
items, such as arugula back in the mid-1980s’ yuppie diets, as well as retiring the
outdated no-longer-prestigious items, such as Derrida (in France but not yet in the US).
This opens yet another front of work for humorous human-computer interaction: their
maintenance content-wise, and it must be done dynamically with regard to the user’s selfor automatically determined and possibly changing level of sophistication. It also
suggests an online version of the product, with all the ensuing pros and cons, commercial
and computational.
Conclusion
Remote as the concern for sophistication levels of HIAs may be, given the advanced but
far from complete level of their implementation, which is heavily dependent on the rapid
but still not quite sufficient progress in NLP, mostly in its semantic and pragmatic
aspects, the issue will not go away and will actually become crucial at the manufacturing
and marketing stage. It is also related to an evasive and highly intriguing
multidisciplinary concept of sophistication that requires much more attention than it has
been getting in the various disciplines that may contribute to it. We hope that a discussion
at the Workshop will expedite sophistication research and thus enhance both the
theoretical and applicational sides of the endeavor.
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