Pre-conference seminars

Pre-conference seminars will be held on Monday 7 July, 2025

Sign for the seminar together with your abstract submission (click for the form here).

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Linguistics: Salvatore Attardo, Texas A& M University, USA

Doing empirical research with the GTVH: a hands-on approach,

Description:

The purpose of this workshop is to show how to leverage the GTVH in empirical research. The workshop will provide an overview of the research process from data collection to publication and review best practices throughout the process. Topics covered will include 1) Gathering data that are relevant to your research question; 2) Formatting your data for computer processing; 3) Identifying humor through triangulation; 4) The GTVH’s Knowledge Resources (KRs): coding each KR, establishing factors. 5) Similarity evaluation using the GTVH. 6) Inter-rater reliability measures: Cohen’s/Fleiss’ Kappa, Krippendorf’s Alpha, and their implementation in R. 7) Writing up your study and getting it published. 8) Pre-registering your study; is it worth it? While the orientation of the workshop is more toward quantitative and mixed methods, it will be useful also for qualitative research. No previous knowledge of the GTVH or of R is required (beginners are encouraged to attend).

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Social Science: Dick Zijp, University of Utrecht, Netherlands

Humour scandals, or the politics of humour in the public sphere

Description:

In recent years, humour has become increasingly prominent in the public sphere, both as a style of communication and a serious and potentially explosive topic of debate. On the one hand, comedians have emerged as important cultural critics, who combine humour with serious political commentary. On the other hand, politicians, especially on the radical and populist right, have increasingly employed humour to mock opponents and attract voters. This so-called “repoliticisation of humour” (Nieuwenhuis and Zijp 2022) has been accompanied by a quick succession of “humour scandals” (Kuipers 2011), or media controversies about transgressive humour – from cartoonists receiving death threats for mocking political and religious leaders to politicians who defend controversial statements as ‘just a joke’.
In this seminar, we will explore the intertwinement of humour and politics by zooming in on such humour scandals. I will present the preliminary results of the UNA HuSca (Humour Scandal) project, which found a steep rise in humour scandals in eight European countries over the past three decades. The participants will be introduced to the methods we used to collect, code and compare humour scandals in a European context. Among the questions we will be trying to answer are: which actors are typically involved in humour scandals, and why do they care? What do humour scandals teach us about the politics of humour, and how do they reflect broader transformations in the media environment, political culture and moral order in and across countries? And do humour scandals primarily function as a means of restoring the social order, or do they (also) actively contribute to polarisation by reinforcing and potentially widening social and political divides?

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Psychology: Andrew Olah, Kansas State University, USA

Description (TBA):

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AI: Tony Veale, University College Dublin, Ireland

Why so un-Serious? Artificial Intelligence, Language Models and Computational Humour, Tony Veale, University College Dublin, Ireland

Description:

Computers have been a foil for humorists for so long that the notion of a humorous computer has itself, until quite recently, remained the stuff of comedy and speculative fiction. This tutorial provides a practical introduction to the research field dedicated to this marriage of opposites, Computational Humour. By exploring what it will take to give our machines a sense of humour, the tutorial will also explore the hidden mental and social computations that make us truly human.

There is good reason for computer science to take humour seriously. By building computer systems with a sense of humour, capable of appreciating the jokes of human users or even of generating jokes of their own, we can turn academic theories into practical realities that amuse, explain, provoke, and delight. The writer Clive James once pronounced that one should not trust anyone lacking a sense of humour, even, indeed, to post a letter, for what is humour but our sense of equanimity and poise in the face of the unpredictable when common sense has been pushed to the brink? This tutorial will describe where researchers are on this road to more humorous machines now that large language models (LLMs) have so dramatically altered the field, and will explore how we might go further towards giving LLMs a robustly human funny bone. I will also cover related issues such as acceptability and value alignment in LLMs, since humour often pushes the bounds of what is socially acceptable in polite company.

Topics to be covered by the tutorial include: theories of humour; early symbolic models; joke analysis; recent developments in the field, as informed by LLMs; practical uses of computational humour in AI; moral dimensions and dilemmas; irony, sarcasm and sentiment; and the capacity (or otherwise) of LLMs to be truly humorous.