Witscript 2: A System for Generating Improvised Jokes Without Wordplay
This work addresses the challenge of creating chatbots with humanlike humor, though it is incremental as it builds on prior wordplay-based joke generation.
The paper tackled the problem of generating conversational jokes without wordplay by developing Witscript 2, a system based on a large language model and expert algorithms, which human evaluators judged as jokes 46% of the time compared to 70% for human-written responses.
A previous paper presented Witscript, a system for generating conversational jokes that rely on wordplay. This paper extends that work by presenting Witscript 2, which uses a large language model to generate conversational jokes that rely on common sense instead of wordplay. Like Witscript, Witscript 2 is based on joke-writing algorithms created by an expert comedy writer. Human evaluators judged Witscript 2's responses to input sentences to be jokes 46% of the time, compared to 70% of the time for human-written responses. This is evidence that Witscript 2 represents another step toward giving a chatbot a humanlike sense of humor.