Cognitive Mechanism of Humor in Riddles: Examination of Relationship between Humor and Semantic Structure of Riddles

Riddles, such as "Why is A like B? Because they relate to C/C'," are a type of Japanese word game. The similarity between concepts in riddles reflect their semantic structures. In this research, the relationships between concept similarities and humor of the riddles were examined using the riddle-generation system on the Wikipedia corpus to cover enough concepts. The riddle-generation system provided riddles on the basis of similar concepts, which were estimated with word2vec using the Wikipedia corpus. The generated riddles were evaluated using the simulation results in order to clarify the relationships between concept similarities and humor. The experiment results suggested that riddles are funniest when the similarities between premises (A or B) and the reasons (C or C') are high and the similarity between the reasons themselves is low. Furthermore, an insufficient similarity between B and C' requires a sufficient amount of similarity between the reasons to elicit humor.