English

Witscript 2: A System for Generating Improvised Jokes Without Wordplay

Computation and Language 2023-02-08 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

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.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2302.03036,
  title  = {Witscript 2: A System for Generating Improvised Jokes Without Wordplay},
  author = {Joe Toplyn},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.03036},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

5 pages. Published in the Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC 2022), pages 54-58. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2301.02695. substantial text overlap with arXiv:2302.02008

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:33:24.071Z