The Times: "Hannu Toivonen wants more titter power at your fingertips"

The Times of London, UK, reports on computational creativity research of the Discovery group of Prof. Hannu Toivonen, more specifically about computational generation of humor:

Academic wants autocorrect to put more titter power at your fingertips

It was obvious what Hannu Toivonen meant — but it was still embarrassing. “I was signing off my e-mail,” he said. “It was meant to say ‘Best Regards’. What it actually read was, ‘Best Retards’.”

Autocorrect had struck again. Most people would have sent an apology, hoped no offence was taken and put it down to the curse of sending e-mails on the move. Professor Toivonen, however, is a computer scientist. So he instead conducted a study into the unintentional humour of the erroneous predictive text — with the goal of teaching computers to be funnier.

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Text: Tom Whipple

Links:

• Copy of the full story "The academic who wants to autocorrect our sense of humour", The Times, January 22nd, 2014, p. 7
• A preview of the article in The Times website, January 22nd, 2014
• The Telegraph's web story, January 22nd, 2014
• The Daily Mail's web story, January 22nd, 2014
• The scientific publication behind the newspaper article: "Let Everything Turn Well in Your Wife": Generation of Adult Humor Using Lexical Constraints. Alessandro Valitutti, Hannu Toivonen, Antoine Doucet, Jukka M. Toivanen. The 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Sofia, Bulgaria, August 2013.
• Discovery research group
• Prof. Hannu Toivonen