A Hard Look at Soft Concepts

Abstract

What can only humans do? What can humans do that machines cannot? These questions have long been tantalizing scientists and philosophers. Many areas, such as creativity and humor, are traditionally considered to be outside the reach of computers. We believe that these territories define an intriguing set of challenges for computer science. We present two approaches for tackling such challenges — an axiomatic one and a data-driven one — and demonstrate our ideas on two real-world applications: finding narratives in large textual corpora and identifying humorous cartoon captions. PDF