The April Fools' Day Workshop on Computational Humour

Challenging issues for natural communication systems

April 15-16, 2002
Conference Room, ITC-irst, Trento, ITALY

Despite its name, the April Fools' Day Workshop on Computational Humour is a serious event. It aims at bringing together research results in the area of computational humour, with an emphasis on the computational interpretation and generation of verbal humour. The workshop follows the successful International Workshop on Computational Humour held in Enschede in 1996. The workshop is an initiative of HAHAcronym, the first European project about computational humour.

The April Fools' Day workshop aims at bringing together research results in the area of computational humour, with an emphasis on the computational interpretation and generation of verbal humour. Stimulating the interaction between artificial intelligence (e.g. natural language technology) and computational humour research is one of the goals of this workshop.

What 'intelligence' is required for the skillful use of humour ? How can modelling humour contribute to modelling intelligence ? What role can humour play in making systems look more intelligent ? A number of research results on humour can suggest a computational treatment of the topic.

One assumption that underlies the research on computational humour is that in future human-machine interaction, humans will demand a naturalness and effectiveness that requires also the incorporation of models of possibly all human cognitive capabilities, including the handling of humour. We believe there are many practical settings where humour 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 the friendliness of natural language interfaces,
• edutainment and autonomous agents systems.

In addition to some invited papers there will be presentations of a selected number of submitted papers. The Workshop Organizers invite researchers to submit original papers as well any demonstrations of systems relevant for the workshop. Details on submission can be found below.

• computational theories of humour, irony and sarcasm
• artificial intelligence and creative language
• computational humour in applied systems
• the role of humour in human-machine interaction
• machine translation and verbal humour
• formalization and processing of humorous language
• semiotics of humour
• storytelling and humour
• multimodal humour
• ...

• Chairman: Oliviero Stock (ITC-irst, Italy)
• Salvatore Attardo (Youngstown University, USA)
• Kim Binsted (I-Chara, Japan)
• Douglas Hofstadter (Indiana University, USA)
• Anton Nijholt (University of Twente,The Netherlands)
• Andrew Ortony (Northwestern University, USA)
• Victor Raskin (Purdue University, USA)
• Willibald Ruch (Queens University, Belfast, UK)
• Carlo Strapparava (ITC-irst, Italy)

• Salvatore Attardo (Youngstown University, USA)
• Aaron Ben-Ze'ev (University of Haifa, Israel)
• Rachel Giora (Tel Aviv University, Israel)
• Douglas Hofstadter (Indiana University, USA)
• Victor Raskin (Purdue University, USA)
• Graeme Ritchie (Edinburgh, Scotland)
• Willibald Ruch (Queens University, Belfast, UK)

Papers will be reviewed by the members of the program committee. Submitted papers must be written in the workshop specific format and must not be longer than 10 pages (including bibliography) . They should be submitted electronically to foolsdayfbk.eu.

• Registration
• Accommodation
• How to Get There
• Program