A Pinch of Humor for Short-Text Conversation: An Information Retrieval Approach

Vladislav Blinov, Kirill Mishchenko, Valeria Bolotova, Pavel Braslavski

Abstract: The paper describes a work in progress on humorous response generation for short-text conversation using information retrieval approach. We gathered a large collection of funny tweets and implemented three baseline retrieval models: BM25, the query term reweighting model based on syntactic parsing and named entity recognition, and the doc2vec similarity model. We evaluated these models in two ways: in situ on a popular community question answering platform and in laboratory settings. The approach proved to be promising: even simple search techniques demonstrated satisfactory performance. The collection, test questions, evaluation protocol, and assessors’ judgments create a ground for future research towards more sophisticated models.