AAAI Technical Report FS-12-02
Artificial Intelligence of Humor
Hansel and Gretel for All Ages:
A Template for Recurring Humor Dialog
Faisal L. Kadri
ArtificialPsychology.com
Dollard Des Ormeaux, QC, Canada
tences have systematic change of preference depending on
the age of the participant. Since the categories are based on
the context of sentences, the existence of humor is not a
necessary condition for the categorization; therefore there
is basis for extending the age dependence to non-humorous
sentences.
The purpose of this work is to demonstrate the utility of
contextual age dependence of sentences using dialog from
the fable of Hansel and Gretel. The next section contains
description of the humor classification and compares it
with another validated humor classification (Martin et al.
2003). Then the statistical evidence from the internet humor appreciation survey is compared with fuzzy logic distribution curves (Zadeh 1965) as used in selecting sentences by a patented software dialog player (Kadri 2010). The
third section introduces the initial dialog of Hansel and
Gretel and describes how the dialog can be augmented in
order to appeal to all age groups.
Abstract
The fable of Hansel and Gretel describes the plight of two
children over two types of threat; harm to their immediate
survival and pain from hunger. The two contexts of selfpreservation and feeding are evident from the flow of the
story dialog, therefore an automatic re-playing of dialog can
be realized by picking sentences from two lists; one containing sentences in the context of self-preservation, the other in
the context of feeding.
Theory and Internet humor appreciation surveys suggest
that humorous sentences in the context of self-preservation
have relatively constant preference with respect to age,
while in the context of hunger and protection of feeding turf
to decline with age, reflecting the reduced need for food
with aging. Sentences in the context of sociosexual relationships increased in preference until adulthood then declined
with maturity. Also, sentences in parenting context, such as
when caring for offspring, society and the environment were
found to increase in preference with age and maturity.
Therefore in order to construct a recursive Hansel and
Gretel dialog for audience of all ages, two lists of sentences
are added to feeding: In sociosexual and parenting contexts.
The self-preservation list is paired with one of the remaining
three, representing three stages of age; youth, adulthood and
maturity.
The single thread story of Hansel and Gretel serves as a
template for recursive dialog, making it possible to create
alternative threads and unbound possibilities for plots,
thereby duplicating the story structure without repeating the
narrative.
Classifying Humor Sentences
The artificial personality model is made of a sentence repertoire of four motivational dimensions; the dimensions are
a representation of states of insecurity, from extreme insecurity to extreme assuredness. Furthermore, each dimension is split in two cognitive divisions depending on how
the insecurity is expressed, either fear or aggression. The
fear internalizes insecurity while aggression externalizes it.
The dimensions are:
1. Emotional sentences: In the context of selfpreservation in the immediate sense. Sentence examples of insecurity externalizing: You are a patronizing bully! And internalizing: I don't like being patronized! A sentence in between could be:
Don't patronize me!
2. Feeding sentences: In the context of protecting
(internalizing) or expanding (externalizing) resources. For example: Illegal immigrants should
Introduction
Statistical evidence from Internet humor appreciation surveys supported the validation of an artificial personality
model (Kadri 2011), the model is composed of a repertoire
of four motivational dimensions, and each dimension contains humorous sentences in categories described by motivational context. The humor survey confirmed that the senCopyright © 2012, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
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be forced out (Externalized). New immigrants
should not be allowed in (internalized).
3. Sociosexual sentences: In the context of relationships. Examples of sociosexual insecurity: Typical male aggressive jealousy (externalizing), typical female defensive jealousy (internalizing).
4. Parenting sentences: In the context of altruism and
raising children. Example sentences attacking
threats to offspring (externalizing) or tending to
the needs of young offspring (internalizing).
In creating a parallel classification for humorous sentences,
humor was classified in four motivational categories; each
category was divided into contextual externalizing and internalizing humor. A short humor appreciation survey with
16 humor sentences was published on-line. The sentences
were distributed equally so that each motivational category
receives four sentences with two each in externalizinginternalizing divisions. Table 1 below shows the humor
sentences and their classification.
crease in preference with age and maturity and to gradually
displace attention from feeding and sociosexual preferences. Figure 1 below shows the changing age preference
of humor as found in the 16-item internet survey, which
used Likert style scoring to measure humor appreciation
and attracted 2703 participants. Scores met the consistency
criterion of Cronbach robust alpha (Christman et al. 2006)
factor of 0.854. Notice that parenting humor has an unpredicted high preference with the youngest participants; this
is explained by the perception of aggression (favored by
young males) in the presented self-defeating humor.
A well-known four way classification based on the use of
humor for the psychological well-being was proposed by
Martin et al. The four classes are: To enhance the self (selfenhancing), to enhance one’s relationships with others (affiliative), to enhance the self at the expense of others (aggressive), and to enhance relationships at the expense of
self (self-defeating).
In comparison with the dimensions of the artificial person-
Class.
Humor sentence
SS.E
Sign on the door of a Moscow hotel room: If this is PT.E
your first visit to the USSR, you are welcome to it.
It's better to let someone think you are an idiot than to open
your mouth and prove it.
FD.I
Some days you are the bug other days you are the FD.E
windscreen.
The darkest hour is just before dawn; so if you are going to
steal your neighbor's milk do it then.
SS.I
Sign in a Copenhagen airline ticket office: We take FD.I
your bags and send them in all directions.
Better the devil you know.
EM.E
Puppies still have bad breath even after eating a tic PT.I
tac.
Don't sneeze when someone is cutting your hair. PT.I
Today's mighty oak is just yesterday's nut that held its
ground.
A child's wisdom: Never do pranks at a police station.
Sign in a Norwegian cocktail lounge: Ladies are EM.I
requested not to have children in the bar.
Never hold a dust buster and a cat at the same
PT.E
time.
Sign in the office of a Roman doctor: Specialist in FD.E
women and other diseases.
My opinions may have changed but not the fact that I'm
right.
My mind not only wanders, sometimes it leaves completely.
EM.I
SS.I
EM.E
SS.E
Class. Humor sentence
Three miser friends went swimming, they betted whoever
dives the least pays for supper; they all ended up dead.
Table 1: Sentences of 16-item Internet humor preference survey. Legend: Emotional/Feeding/Sociosexual/Parenting
= EM/FD/SS/PT and Externalizing/Internalizing = .E/.I
ality, the parallels are obvious between all four dimensions: emotional/feeding/sociosexual/parenting on one
hand,
and
self-enhancing/aggressive/affiliative/selfdefeating respectively on another. However, the parallels
do not extend to the externalizing-internalizing divide,
which is not represented in the psychological well-being
classification. At first glance, the psychological well-being
classification may seem exhaustive but a careful examination would reveal types of humor with no obvious place in
the classification. While self-enhancing humor could possibly describe internalizing and externalizing sentences, the
other three are strictly externalizing. Aggressive humor ex-
Self-preservation is a motivation that exists in all ages;
theory (Kadri et al. 1995) suggests that sentences in the
context of self-preservation have relatively constant preference with respect to age. In contrast, sentences in the context of hunger and protection of feeding turf were predicted
to decline with age, reflecting the decreasing need for food
that is highest while growing up during childhood, then
gradually falling with age. Sentences in the context of sociosexual relationships which were expected to increase in
preference until adulthood then to decline with maturity,
and in parenting context sentences were predicted to in-
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ternalizes insecurity and is described without context. Affiliative humor presumes the existence of social relationship, a type of humor that is not included yet shares the social context is Nonsense humor (Ruch et al. 1990), and
self-defeating does not include humor that enhances offspring and society without defeating the self. Nevertheless,
a reminder of the parallel is useful as a check on the validity of the statistical results in fig. 1; Martin et al. did find
that aggressive humor declined in preference with age and
self-defeating was favored increasingly with age, like their
respective parallels, feeding and parenting humors.
Fig. 2 Fuzzy logic membership curves used to select sentences in simulated age.
The software user selects an age for an artificial personality, which sets values of probabilities associated with each
dimension along the curves. When the personality receives
a prompt or a sentence from the opposite personality it selects a sentence from target dimensions according to the
probabilities of its age.
Fig. 1 Group average humor appreciation change with age.
Augmenting Hansel and Gretel
Utilizing Humor-Age Dependence
The dialog of Hansel and Gretel is carried on mainly between the two personalities, Hansel who is young, playful
and hungry, and Gretel who senses the threats and tries to
protect both. The varying degrees of insecurity and the two
contexts of self-preservation and feeding are evident from
the flow of the story dialog. The first and second columns
of table 2 below constitute the first scene of the dialog. If
only two contextual lists of sentences were created, one in
the context of self-preservation the other in feeding, an automatic re-playing of dialog can be realized by picking alternative sentences from the two lists.
A U.S. patent was granted in 2010 for software artificial
psychology dialog player utilizing the subject artificial personality. The software selects sentences according to fuzzy
logic rules (Zadeh 1965) from a repertoire of four dimensions. The four dimensions are organized in three pairs:
Common emotional dimension and one of the three feeding, sociosexual or parenting dimensions. The pairing reflects three age groups where the sentences are picked with
maximum probability. The distribution of probabilities is
shown in fig. 2 below and is intended to reflect the
smoothed empirical distribution of fig. 1.
Act 1: Gretel - Emotional
La..LaLaLa. .. Waiting song..
Quiet; father said When all doors
are shut a window will open.
Mom will make pudding for our
neighbour tonight, we will share.
Get back to work and keep busy
until then.
Young Hansel - Feeding
Food glorious food.. I wish
Mother is back.
Words won't fill my stomach, I'm
hungry.
Yeah, creamy pudding.
I don't want to work, lets play a
game.
Table 2a First scene of Hansel and Gretel.
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Adult Hansel - Sociosexual
This forest is creepy, it makes
me feel so lonely.
He got married so soon after
our real mother died.
I am not hungry, I miss Inge
my girlfriend.
I don't want to work, lets play a
game.
References
Mature Hansel - Parenting
I wish I could do something
useful instead of wasting time.
He works everyday, we should
carry the burden.
I collected these berries for the
neighbor's cake.
I can't find any more berries,
now we can play.
Christmann, A. and Van Aelst, S. 2006. Robust estimation
of Cronbach's alpha. Journal of Multivariate Analysis 97,
1660-1674.
Kadri, F. L. and Duncan, I. J. H. 1995. A New Nonlinear
Model of Mechanisms of Motivation. Behavioural Processes Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 273-288.
Kadri, F. L. 2010. Artificial Psychology Dialog Player with
Aging Simulation. United States Patent number 7644040.
Table 2b Adulthood and maturity augmentation.
A dialog thread is played by picking a start line and following linked sentences. If there is more than one link to
the target sentences then more than one thread is possible.
For tailoring the story to wider age audience the feeding
dimension must be augmented; a sociosexual and parenting
dimensions should be added for full age coverage. The
third and fourth columns contain sentences in sociosexual
and parenting context representing three stages of human
aging. A fine selection of age creates precise ratios between the three and leads to probabilistic selection from
the three age sensitive dimensions. Thus, the single thread
story of Hansel and Gretel serves as template for recursive
dialog, adding more sentences to create alternative threads
and unbound possibilities for plots, thereby duplicating the
story structure without repeating the narrative.
Kadri, F. L. 2011. The Design and Validation of an Artificial Personaity, Kybernetes Vol 40, No. 7/8, pp. 10781089.
Martin, R. A., Puhlik, D. P., Larsen, G., Gray, J., & Weir,
K. 2003. Individual differences in uses of humor and their
relation to psychological well-being, Development of the
humor Styles Questionnaire. Journal of Research in Personality 37, 48-75.
Ruch, W., Mcghee, P. E. and Hehl, F. J. 1990. Age Differences in the Enjoyment of Incongruity-Resolution and
Nonsense Humor during Adulthood. Psychology and Aging 5: 348-355.
Zadeh, L. A. 1965. Fuzzy sets. Information and Control 8:
338–353
Conclusions
There is explicit statistical evidence linking age and humor
sentence preference, the link implicitly extends to nonhumor age preference since the classification is contextual
and does not require the existence of humor. A patented
dialog player which implements the same age preference
makes it possible to select sentences to match the age of
the user. The initial dialog of the fable of Hansel and
Gretel was used to illustrate how the original plot, which
appeals mainly to children, could be augmented in order to
appeal to all ages.
The application of matching dialog with the age of target
audience could be on several fronts, such as a marketing
tool to match the right sales pitch with potential purchasers, or as a tool of man-machine user interface to make the
interface more user friendly, leading to higher productivity
and shorter learning curves, or as an educational tool to
match specific requirements of learning audience.
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