Searching for Puns: Towards Identification of Humour on Twitter

Research has shown that casual leisure search - when users are searching for entertainment purposes and with no fixed information need to fulfil - is becoming an increasingly common type of online task. A frequently occurring type of casual leisure search involves users looking for something humorous to help pass the time, such as a short gag or pun. An almost unlimited source of such material is Twitter, a service which allows millions of users to post short messages (known as tweets) to their followers. Despite the potential offered by Twitter, it is often very difficult to extract good quality content from the huge number of nonsense messages posted. In this work we conduct a small user study (n=8) to try to learn whether people agree on what a humorous tweet is and discuss ways in which we could learn how to automatically identify funny jokes, gags and puns posted on Twitter.