Humour is pervasive in human social relationships and one of the most common ways to induce positive feelings in others. Research studies have shown that innocent humour increases likeability, boosts friendship, alleviates stress, encourages creativity and improves teamwork. Humour embraces various types of expression – both verbal and non-verbal – and can be used to enhance the interaction outcome while being socially and culturally appropriate.

While humour is a well-established branch in artificial intelligence and natural language processing communities, in the human-computer interaction field humour is rather regarded as marginal research topic, despite its positive effects scientifically proven by decades of research. Therefore, in this workshop we aim to explore challenges in designing, developing and evaluating humourful interactions, as well as benefits and downsides of using humour in interactive tasks with artificial entities.

We are welcoming original contributions from a wide range of disciplines, such as human-computer interaction, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, social robotics, psychology, media, arts etc. Topics expected include – but are not limited to:

• Computational humor approaches & applications for dialogue technologies
• Linguistic resources for analysing and modelling humor in dialogue interactions
• Annotation schemes for computationally modelling humor
• Computational humor generation & identification in dialogues using phonology and/or semantics
• Humorous virtual agents & social robots & chatbots
• Linguistics and non-linguistics challenges in designing humor
• Evaluation approaches for humorous interactions
• Cultural and social norms for appropriate humorous interactions