Students created an artificial intelligence program to recognize “that’s what she said” jokes.

Chloé Kiddon and Yuriy Brun are computer science and engineering students at the University of Washington. Their challenge was to create a computer system capable of recognizing sexual related humor, a classification that can be difficult to program into computers since there is an element of subjectivity to it. 

More specifically, Kiddon and Brun wanted the computer to identify "that’s what she said" jokes. For those who might not know, "that’s what she said" jokes are when a normal phrase is twisted to have a sexual meaning. “That’s what she said” jokes were re-popularized by the show "The Office," although they've existed for some time. 

To identify jokes that are highly subjective and subject to cultural ideas requires some very particular specifications. The two big specifications Kiddon and Bun used were the identification of “nouns that are euphemisms for sexually explicit nouns” and sentences that “share common structure with sentences in the erotic domain.” 

By giving the computer these two items to recognize, the students hoped the computer would be able to pick up the “that’s what she said” jokes. The computer system was relatively successful in identifying the jokes. Check out their results at the source.

(Source)