Towards the Cognitive Informatics of Natural Language: The Case of Computational Humor

This paper deals with a contribution of computational analysis of verbal humor to natural language cognition. After a brief introduction to the growing area of computational humor and of its roots in humor theories, it describes and compares the results of a human-subject and computer experiment. The specific interest is to compare how well the computer, equipped with the resources and methodologies of the Ontological Semantic Technology, a comprehensive meaning access approach to natural language processing, can model several aspects of the cognitive behaviors of humans processing jokes from the Internet. The paper, sharing several important premises with cognitive informatics, is meant as a direct contribution to this rapidly developing transdisciplinary field, and as such, it bears on cognitive computing as well, especially at the level of implementation of computational humor in non-toy systems and the relationship to human cognitive processes of understanding and producing humor.