Humor Prevails! - Implementing a Joke Generator into a Conversational System

This paper contains the results of evaluation experiments conducted to investigate if implementation of a pun generator into a non-task oriented talking system improves the latter's performance. We constructed a simple joking conversational system and conducted one user evaluation experiment and two third person evaluation experiments. The results showed that humor does have a positive influence on the dialogue between humans and computers. The implications of this fact and problems that occurred during the research are discussed. We also propose how they can be solved in the future.