From the Semantics of Humor to Semantic Search

Ontological Semantics in our current proprietary version OntoSem 2.3 is hakia’s core natural language technology. It is a theory of language meaning with an interesting pedigree, one of its ancestors being the “Semantic Script Theory of Humor”, developed by Victor Raskin in 1985 in his book Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. While it might sound a little funny, as noted by ZDNet’s Paul Miller with whom I recently talked at the Semantic Technology Conference, the development from a theory of humor to an application in Internet search is actually quite logical.

For a text to be humorous is for it to have a specific meaning. And in order to adequately describe meaning, we need a complex semantic theory including a rich repository of world information, an ontology, structured around “scripts”. These chunks of world knowledge are evoked in a specific constellation in humor. Let’s look at an example:

“Is the doctor at home?” the patient asked in his bronchial whisper.
“No”, the doctor’s young and pretty wife whispered in reply. “Come right in.”

When humans process this text, “doctor” will trigger a general medical script for them, into which the meanings of “patient” and “bronchial whisper” fit nicely. In this medical script, the doctor’s wife will then probably “whisper” to comfort the ailing patient. The additional information that she is “young” and “pretty” seems at least odd, until the punchline tells us that we are not reading about a reverse house visit, but, at least in the mind of the wife, about an adulterous encounter. For humans, just as for computers, to get this joke, they need world knowledge that is structured in such a way that a medical script be in opposition to a non-medical, sexual script: enter OntoSem! For a computer to get the meaning of text on a webpage and match it to a query, it needs just that: A rich ontology that it can use to identify meanings of words in language, no matter if it’s English or Japanese.

Thus, it was quite logical that I represented hakia at the International Summer School for Research in Humor and Laughter in Galati, Romania, last week, where lecturers from around the world introduced participants to existing theories and methods in humor research. My talks included general introductions to (computational) semantics and a dedicated lecture on OntoSem as a tool for humor research as well as the core of an Internet search engine.

Making sense of humor with OntoSem is just a specific version of making sense of language in general, the foundation of hakia’s semantic search.

        

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