skip to main content
10.1145/3520495.3520517acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesozchiConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

Conversational Agents Replying with a Manzai-style Joke

Published: 15 September 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Automated conversational agents are becoming popular in various everyday contexts. In order to fulfill a more important role in human society, people would need to feel a sense of familiarity with such agents. To achieve this, we focus on humor, which enables familiar relationships between people and agents. In this study, we propose an interaction style of a pair of conversational agents that make humorous statements in conversation with users in real time, referring to the Japanese Manzai. In this method, a pair of agents, one making the joke and the other serving as the butt of the joke, perform humor in real time. The results of the experiment using the prototype system showed that when the agents performed humorous statements during conversations with users, the humans perceived that agent as expressing a sense of humor, and their motivation to continue the conversation increased.

References

[1]
Stephan Diederich, Alfred Benedikt Brendel and Lutz Kolbe. 2019. On Conversational Agents in Information Systems Research: Analyzing the Past to Guide Future Work, Wirtschaftsinformatik.
[2]
Apple Inc. Siri. Retrieved Oct 28, 2021 from https://www.apple.com/ios/siri/
[3]
Google LLC Google assistant. Retrieved Oct 28, 2021 from https://assistant.google.com/
[4]
Peter Khooshabeh, Sudeep Gandhe Cade McCall, Jonathan Gratch and James Blascovich 2011. Does it matter computer jokes. Proc. 2011 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 77-86.
[5]
Ewa Lugar and Abigail Sellen: Like Having a Really Bad PA. 2016. The Gulf between User Expectation and Experience of Conversational Agents. Proc. 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 5286-5297.
[6]
Vera Q Liao, Muhammed Mas-ud Hussain, Praveen Chandar, Matthew Davis, Yasaman Khazaeni, Marco Patricio Crasso, Dakuo Wang, Michael Muller, N.Sadat Shami and Werner Geyer. 2018. All Work and no Play? Conversations with a Question and-Answer Chatbot in the Wild. Proc.2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1-13.
[7]
Marta Dynel. 2009. Beyond a Joke: Types of Conversational Humour. Language and Linguistics Compass, Vol.3, 1284-1299.
[8]
Janet Holmes. 2006. Sharing a laugh: Pragmatic aspects of humor and gender in the workplace. Journal of Pragmatics, Vol.38, 26-50.
[9]
Kazuki Haraguchi, Kazuki Yane, Akira Sato, Eiji Aramaki, Isao Miyashiro and Akiyo Nadamoto. 2020. Chat-type Manzai application: mobile daily comedy presentations based on automatically generated manzai scenarios. Proc. 2018 International Conference on Advances in Mobile Computing & Multimedia. 143-152.
[10]
Dongkeon Lee, Seung-Ho Han, Kyo-Joong Oh, and Ho-Jin Choi. 2017. A temporal community contexts based funny joke generation. In Mobile Data Management. 2017 18th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management. Vol.1, 360-365.
[11]
Tomohiro Umetani, Satoshi Aoki, Kazuhiro Akiyama, Ryo Mashimo, Tatsuya Kitamura and Akiyo Nadamoto. 2016. Scalable Component-Based Manzai Robots as Automated Funny Content Generators. Journal of Robotics and Mechatronics, Vol.28, No.6, 862-869.
[12]
Hans Wim Tinholt and Anton Nijholt. 2007. Computational humor : Utilizing cross-reference ambiguity for conversational jokes. In International Workshop on Fuzzy Logic and Applications, Vol.4578, 477–483.
[13]
Oliviero Stock and Carlo Strapparava. 2003. Getting serious about the development of computational humor. In International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 59–64.
[14]
Pawel Dybala, Michal Ptaszynski, Jacek Maciejewski, Mizuki Takahashi, Rafal Rzepk and Kenji Araki. 2010. Multiagent system for joke generation: Humor and emotions combined in human-agent conversation. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Smart Environments, Vol.2, 31-48.
[15]
Kenro Go, Daiji Nagaoka, Ryota Nakahara and Akihiro Miyata. 2020. A Conversational Agent Replying with a Humor by Topic-Word Substitution. Journal of Information Processing Society of Japan, Vol.61, No.1, 113-122 in Japanese.
[16]
George A. Miller. 1995. WordNet: A Lexical Database for English. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 38, No.11, 39-41.
[17]
Tatsuo Abe. 2005. Manzai ni okeru "tukkomi" no ruikei to sono hyogenkoka(Types of "tsukkomi" and their expressive effects in manzai). Kokugogaku Kenkyu To Siryo, Vol 28, 48-60.
[18]
Satoshi Kinsui. 1992. Boke to tukkomi - goyoron ni yoru manzai no kaiwa no bunseki - (Bokeh and Tsukkomi -An Analysis of Manzai Conversation Using Pragmatics-). Izumi Shoin Kamigata no bunka Kamigata kotoba no konzyaku, 62-90 in Japanese.
[19]
Kenro Go, Shion Tominaga, Yuta Muto and Akihiro Miyata. 2020 A Joking System Using Role-Separated Conversational Agents, Journal of Information Processing Society of Japan. Vol.61, No.8, 1353-1362 in Japanese.
[20]
MeCab: Yet another part-of-speech and morphological analyzer, Retrieved Oct 28, 2021 from http://taku910.github.io/mecab/
[21]
Tomas Mikolov, Kai Chen, Greg Corrado and Jeffrey Dean. 2013. Efficient estimation of word representations in vector space. Proc. ICLR’13.
[22]
National Institute of Information and Communications Technology: EDR Electronic Dictionary 2002.

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Comparative Analysis with Multiple Large-Scale Language Models for Automatic Generation of Funny DialoguesDatabase Systems for Advanced Applications. DASFAA 2024 International Workshops10.1007/978-981-96-0914-7_13(187-202)Online publication date: 23-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Evaluation of Prosodic Features Suitable for Conversational Agents Replying with a JokeJournal of Information Processing10.2197/ipsjjip.32.3532(35-40)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Generative Action Procedure Manzai Scenario Based on Maslow’s Stages of Need TheoryAdvances in Network-Based Information Systems10.1007/978-3-031-72325-4_31(319-327)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2024
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
OzCHI '21: Proceedings of the 33rd Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction
November 2021
361 pages
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 September 2022

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. Manzai
  2. conversational agent
  3. human–agent interaction
  4. humor

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Conference

OzCHI '21
OzCHI '21: 33rd Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction
November 30 - December 2, 2021
VIC, Melbourne, Australia

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 362 of 729 submissions, 50%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)18
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 05 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2025)Comparative Analysis with Multiple Large-Scale Language Models for Automatic Generation of Funny DialoguesDatabase Systems for Advanced Applications. DASFAA 2024 International Workshops10.1007/978-981-96-0914-7_13(187-202)Online publication date: 23-Jan-2025
  • (2024)Evaluation of Prosodic Features Suitable for Conversational Agents Replying with a JokeJournal of Information Processing10.2197/ipsjjip.32.3532(35-40)Online publication date: 2024
  • (2024)Generative Action Procedure Manzai Scenario Based on Maslow’s Stages of Need TheoryAdvances in Network-Based Information Systems10.1007/978-3-031-72325-4_31(319-327)Online publication date: 20-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Should Technology Be More Fun(ny)? Leveraging Humor to Improve User Acceptance and Enjoyment of Social Robots and Virtual AgentsThe Palgrave Handbook of Humour Research10.1007/978-3-031-52288-8_3(51-75)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2024
  • (2023)The Bot on Speaking Terms: The Effects of Conversation Architecture on Perceptions of Conversational AgentsProceedings of the 5th International Conference on Conversational User Interfaces10.1145/3571884.3597139(1-16)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
  • (2023)Automatic Generation of Funny-Dialog Based on Cuisine RecipesAdvances in Networked-based Information Systems10.1007/978-3-031-40978-3_24(216-226)Online publication date: 24-Aug-2023

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

HTML Format

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media