“The [New Yorker]’s cartoon editor collaborated with Microsoft researchers on an artificial intelligence project that aims to teach machines what’s funny
Dafna Shahaf, a researcher at Microsoft, attended a speech by New Yorker cartoon editor Robert Mankoff about the cartoon archive, and she left feeling excited. Shahaf wondered whether she could teach a computer to accurately assess how funny a caption might prove to be—and in the process, crack one of the most difficult challenges in machine learning. Sarcasm, wordplay, and other tools of humor have perplexed AI systems for decades. At Microsoft, teaching machines and software to get the joke is important for things like the Skype Translator, which is designed to let users speak to each other in different languages and hear translations on the fly.”
Did you see the one about www.bloomberg.com? 😉