Automatic Creation of Humorous Acronyms

Abstract

Society needs humor, not just for entertainment. In the current business world, humor is considered to be so important that companies may hire humor consultants. Humor can be used “to criticize without alienating, to defuse tension or anxiety, to introduce new ideas, to bond teams, ease relationships and elicit cooperation”. As far as human-computer interfaces are concerned, in the future we will demand naturalness and effectiveness that require the incorporation of models of possibly all human cognitive capabilities, including the handling of humor [1]. There are many practical settings where computational humor will add value. Among them there are: business world applications (such as advertisement, e-commerce, etc.), general computer-mediated communication and human-computer interaction, increase in the friendliness of natural language interfaces, educational and edutainment systems. Not necessarily applications need to emphasize interactivity. For instance there are important prospects for humor in automatic information presentation. In the Web age presentations will become more and more flexible and personalized and will require humor contributions for electronic commerce developments (e.g. product promotion, getting selective attention, help in memorizing names etc) more or less as it happened in the world of advertisement within the old broadcast communication.