Humor plays an essential role in human interactions. Precisely what makes something funny, however, remains elusive. While research on natural language understanding has made significant advancements in recent years, there has been little direct integration of humor research with computational models of language understanding. In this paper, we…

This paper will analyze the function of final particle "yo", and factors that may affect the use of "yo" in order to avoid FTAs if there is any. The data used in this paper is a transcription of a 10-minute unscripted excerpt from a Japanese comedy variety show called "Shabekuri 007". The excerpt was first aired on…

A corpus of 313 freshman college essays was analyzed in order to better understand the forms and functions of humor in academic writing. Human ratings of humor and wordplay were statistically aggregated using Factor Analysis to provide an overall "Humor" component score for each essay in the corpus. In addition, the essays were also…

This paper reports on an investigation into the reactions of 147 participants of various ethnicities to a language practice in the USA that has been characterized as Mock Spanish, a special register in which Spanish words or phrases are used to evoke humor by indexing an often unflattering image of Spanish speakers. Research questions include…