Exploring the Automatic Generation of Riddles in Portuguese

This article describes several experiments towards the automatic generation of riddles in Portuguese, based on two known features of given concepts. In addition to making sense, one of our goals was to produce novel riddles, ideally, with some humour potential, at least when compared to the so called "piadas secas" (dry jokes). Part of the challenge involved the identification of suitable linguistic resources for this goal, followed by setting rules for their exploitation, given some hypothesis that could increase their novelty and humouristic value. Finally, riddles were rendered as question-answer pairs. The article is mainly focused on a kind of riddles, for which the generation model is dissected, some examples are presented, and a sample was manually classified by human judges, who, overall, rated them as coherent, moderately novel, but still with a low humor potential. In order to show how much can still be done, namely about the humor value, the article also presents, briefly, two other experiments, still in an early stage.