Major: Computational Creativity: Building a Model of Machine Generated Humor

“该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。“计算创造力从一开始就一直是人工智能的目标。 但是，尽管已经开发了许多有趣的模型，其中一些甚至产生了有趣的创意作品，但大多数模型都是建立在无法扩展或难以跨越不同领域的基础上的，或者两者兼而有之。 在这个项目中，PI将探索一种替代方案，其中创造力，特别是幽默，被建模为智能控制的分层系统，使用基于案例的推理，简单的检索和过滤机制。 具体来说，这是一个努力，在可信的喜剧代理人的领域，其中的控制和广度的问题是解耦的，并由两个非常不同的系统处理。 对于控制，PI将使用基于案例的规划的变体，为内容获取、评估、转换、组合和呈现提供任务级指导;对于广度，他将采用信息检索的词汇技术，这些技术将用于挖掘跨越各种领域的在线资源。 PI的目标是提供一个创造力和幽默的模型，其工作方式与专业喜剧作家或即兴表演者的工作方式大致相同。 这些专业人士“挖掘”他们的记忆，以获得经验，但他们不仅仅是“自由联想”。相反，他们采用了一套惯例或技术，可以应用和范围跨越任何领域，以产生特定的喜剧效果。 以这种方式对人类技能进行建模将产生一个鲁棒的和可扩展的系统，该系统能够提供广泛的覆盖范围（通过良好理解和可扩展的信息检索技术），而不牺牲推理系统提供的控制能力。 事实上，不管它在说什么，它都会很有趣。 这项研究将通过检查机器生成的内容，以及从现有资源中创建新内容和内容形式来提高我们对创作过程的理解。 它还将支持新技术的发展，以支持人类的创造力，因为由此产生的模型和系统将使高层次的创作新类型的交互式“信息”经验。更广泛的影响：PI预计，至少有两个广泛的社会影响将从这项工作中产生。 首先，他将实际创建智能喜剧表演代理，并在线和离线部署它们，以供日常公民享受和照明。 其次，这项研究将吸引、发展和培养一种同样新型的人工智能研究人员，他们的思维视野将超越单一机器的局限。 特别是，我们的目标是吸引更广泛的学生（包括代表性不足的妇女在工程）从通信研究和戏剧，谁想要做的研究机器作为一种通信和创造性表达的设备，使之成为可能，并通过智能系统的调解支持。 PI认为，这是人工智能作为一个领域发展的关键一步，吸引了下一代创造性和创新性的思想家，他们将能够为语义和推理的世界带来新的光明，同时构建具有艺术力量的工件。

"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."Computational creativity has been a goal of artificial intelligence since nearly its inception. But while many interesting models have been developed, and some of these have even produced interesting creative works, most have been built on foundations that either don't scale, or don't easily scope across different domains, or both. In this project the PI will explore an alternative in which creativity, and in particular humor, is modeled as a layered system of intelligent control, using case-based reasoning, of simple retrieval and filtering mechanisms. Specifically, this is an effort, in the realm of believable comedy agents, in which the issues of control and breadth are decoupled and handled by two very different sorts of systems. For control, the PI will use a variant of case-based planning to provide task-level guidance to content acquisition, evaluation, transformation, combination, and presentation; for breadth, he will employ lexical technologies from information retrieval that will be used to mine online resources spanning a wide variety of domains. The PI's goal is to provide a model of creativity and humor that works in much the same way that a professional comedy writer or improvisational performer does. These professionals "mine" their memories for experiences, but they do not merely "free associate." Instead, they employ a set of conventions or techniques that can be applied and scoped across any domain to produce a specific comedic effect. Modeling human skill in this way will result in a robust and scalable system that is able to provide breadth of coverage (through well understood and scalable information retrieval techniques), without sacrificing the power of control provided by the reasoning system. In effect, it will be funny no matter what it is talking about. This research will improve our understanding of creative processes through an examination of machine-generated content, and the creation of new content and content forms derived from existing resources. It will also support the development of new technologies to support human creativity, in that the resulting models and systems will enable high-level authoring of new kinds of interactive "information" experiences.Broader Impacts: The PI expects that at least two broad societal impacts will derive from this work. First, he will actually create intelligent comedic performance agents and deploy them both on- and off-line for the enjoyment and illumination of everyday citizens. Second, this research will attract, develop, and produce an equally new type of AI researcher whose vision of the mind scopes beyond the confines of a single machine. In particular, the goal is to attract a broader set of students (including the underrepresented group of women in engineering) from communications studies and theater, who want to do research on the machine as a device for communication and creative expression made possible and supported by the mediation of intelligent systems. The PI believes this is a crucial step in the development of AI as a field, drawing in a next generation of creative and innovative thinkers who will be able to bring new light into the world of semantics and inference while building artifacts with artistic power.