About Manatee Comics
Manatee is an automatically generated webcomic system that attempts to complete a common English expression in a funny or thought provoking manner. To this end, the system mines the internet for sentences, tallying words that occur next to one another. This statistical information then guides the construction of a humorous or insightful phrase that is set agaist the back-drop of a related photograph.
How does it work? Where do the jokes come from?
There are humorous phrases people use everyday, like “I'm all over it like white on rice” or “one man's trash is another man's treasure” that are quite templative in nature. Templative phrases are phrases that can be reused with different words for a new situation or set of circumstances. The Manatee system has a library of these phrases and constructs them together with information found on the internet to make jokes.
How are the jokes made?
Consider the phrase “One man's trash is another man's treasure.” The template for this phrase looks something like “One man's X is another man's Y.” For this template to work, the relationship between X and Y needs to be one of opposition. So Trash is opposed to Treasure. Also standing in opposition are things like Vice and Virtue, or Luck and Skillful Play. So the system can use knowledge of opposed concepts to form new, compelling versions of this phrase, like “One man's vice is another man's virtue.”
But how does the system get knowledge of opposition for this particular joke? Well, it looks for certain sentences on the internet that indicate opposition. So if the system is trying to make a joke about luck, one of the things it does is look for the sentence “luck is the opposite of *.” It knows that when a word appears in place of * in that sentence, chances are good that it is opposed to luck. If it finds these opposed words, it can then make a joke about luck!
How are the comics put together?
Well, a comic needs visuals, so after the system creates a joke, it searchs for a large related photograph and cuts it up into a three-panel comic strip. The visual structure is inspired by this gem of a web comic. The image has to be large so that it can be cut up into three different panels and still be interesting. It has to be a photograph because large regions of a single color tend to be boring and photographs rarely have these sorts of regions. In general, three image fragments reliably provide a provacative backdrop for presenting jokes. The structure is suggestive of meaning, but open to interpretation.
How does it work? Where do the jokes come from?
There are humorous phrases people use everyday, like “I'm all over it like white on rice” or “one man's trash is another man's treasure” that are quite templative in nature. Templative phrases are phrases that can be reused with different words for a new situation or set of circumstances. The Manatee system has a library of these phrases and constructs them together with information found on the internet to make jokes.How are the jokes made?
Consider the phrase “One man's trash is another man's treasure.” The template for this phrase looks something like “One man's X is another man's Y.” For this template to work, the relationship between X and Y needs to be one of opposition. So Trash is opposed to Treasure. Also standing in opposition are things like Vice and Virtue, or Luck and Skillful Play. So the system can use knowledge of opposed concepts to form new, compelling versions of this phrase, like “One man's vice is another man's virtue.”But how does the system get knowledge of opposition for this particular joke? Well, it looks for certain sentences on the internet that indicate opposition. So if the system is trying to make a joke about luck, one of the things it does is look for the sentence “luck is the opposite of *.” It knows that when a word appears in place of * in that sentence, chances are good that it is opposed to luck. If it finds these opposed words, it can then make a joke about luck!