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Apr 30, 2011





Double entendres have been making us laugh since the days of Chaucer and Shakespeare, but up until now computers weren't in on the joke. ChloĆ© Kiddon and Yuriy Brun, two computer scientists at the University of Washington, have developed a system for recognising a particular type of double entendre - the "that's what she said" joke, in which seemingly innocent sentences can be transformed into lewd utterances by appending just four short words. 


The pair describe the "TWSS problem" as recognising when it is funny to follow a sentence with "that's what she said" - they give "Don't you think these buns are a little too big for this meat?" as one example. The equivalent in the UK is appending sentences with "as the actress said to the bishop" and is used in the same way.

Automating this process means identifying sentences that contain potential euphemisms and follow a particular structure - a "hard natural language understanding problem", say the researchers. Kiddon and Brun began by analysing two different bodies of text - one containing 1.5 million erotic sentences, and another with 57,000 from standard literature. 

They then evaluated nouns, adjectives and verbs with a "lala" function to determine whether a sentence is a potential TWSS. Examples of nouns with a high lala function are "rod" and "meat", while raunchy adjectives are "hot" and "wet". 

Their automated system, known as Double Entendre via Noun Transfer or DEviaNT, rates sentences for their TWSS potential by looking for particular elements such as nouns that can be interpreted in multiple ways. The researchers trained DEviaNT by gathering jokes fromtwssstories.com and non-TWSS text from sites such as wikiquote.org. 

The system turned out to be around 70% accurate, but the pair say this is deceptively low because much of the training data did not consist of TWSS jokes, and with a more even data set it could achieve 99.5% precision. 

The results will be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in June. Future work could also see DEviaNT extended to identify other kinds of jokes, say the researchers, writing "The technique of metaphorical mapping may be generalised to identify other types of double entendres and other forms of humor". 



That's what she said.


Link: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/04/software-works-out-whether-tha.html

39 comments:

  1. "That's What She Said," even if it became so overused it stopped being funny, is still my favorite joke of the past few years.

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  2. haha the video ... just hilarious

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  3. great video, i love the office!

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  4. Hahaha, really like The Office. Steve Carrell's the best

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  5. I love using the words double entendre and watching as people have no idea what it means.

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  6. Steve Carrell is awesome! Thanks for the vid, was lulz worthy ;>

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  7. I wish he wasn't leaving the show :(

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  8. I love these sort of jokes. Always makes you careful about what you're about to say...

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  9. it was painful to watch that show sometimes

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  10. How cool :D Being a scientist must be awesome sometimes. ^^

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  11. i hate the office, little britin was funny though

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  12. This might be the most substantial piece of literature I have ever read in my entire life.

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  13. Stops being funny when everybody says it in my opinion

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  14. nice blog :D, the funnyspider is a great name

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  15. Haha, Good one from Steve Carrel

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  16. Only nerds would spend that much time delving into the american language, writing papers and programs, for "that's what she said"

    Love it.

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  17. And just when I thought that Star Trek nerds were the worst, a new challenger approaches! :P Critical analysis of double entendre!

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  18. WATT i gotta read this again

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  19. Probably one of my most frequently used phrases :D

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  20. Lmao thats what she said button like the staples button! "TWSS!"

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  21. it made ​​me laugh thank you

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  22. thats what she said! :D
    followed!

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  23. I gotta say, Will Ferrell was a good choice for the show to try and replace Steve with.

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  24. Haha I don't even like the office but I like that clip! Great post!

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  25. Man, computers are remarkable, aren't they?

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