Witscript 2: A System for Generating Improvised Jokes Without Wordplay

TL;DR

Witscript 2 introduces a large language model-based system that generates conversational jokes relying on common sense, marking progress toward more humanlike humor in chatbots.

Contribution

It extends the original Witscript system by replacing wordplay with common sense reasoning using a large language model.

Findings

Witscript 2's jokes were judged as humorous 46% of the time by humans.

Compared to human responses, Witscript 2 shows significant improvement over previous systems.

The system demonstrates progress toward humanlike humor in conversational AI.

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.