Mumbai IITians seek bot-om of humour

As shown by French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose dissertation on the ‘mechanistic’ theory of laughter is impenetrable to all but the most single-mindedly serious of scholars, trying to deconstruct the nuts and bolts of humour can be a thankless job. Undeterred by such precedents, a team from IIT-Mumbai is reportedly getting into the literally funny business of trying to get bots — the software applications that can send out and receive routine communications much faster than humans can — to understand sarcasm, among other forms of humour. The exercise has been undertaken after a passenger, whose baggage had been sent to a city other than the one she’d flown to, described her flight as ‘Excellent’ on the carrier’s website, only to get the automated response, ‘Thank you, we always try to provide our passengers with the best service.’

The IIT team tries to find out if computers, which are capable of fuzzy logic, can also grasp the double, or triple, entendres of funny or punny logic. Can a bot be taught to understand and use a mot juste, or a bot juste? Can a funny bone, or at least a funny byte, be implanted in a computer? Jokes apart, the IIT study might well come to demonstrate that digital devices can, indeed, have the last laugh on us by showing that when it comes to humour, they’re very wit it.