When a Computer Cracks a Joke: Automated Generation of Humorous Headlines

Abstract

Automated news generation has become a major interest for new agencies in the past. Oftentimes headlines for such automatically generated news articles are unimaginative as they have been generated with ready-made templates. We present a computationally creative approach for headline generation that can generate humorous versions of existing headlines. We evaluate our system with human judges and compare the results to human authored humorous titles. The headlines produced by the system are considered funny 36\% of the time by human evaluators.