Early Humorous Interaction: Towards a Formal Model (2025)

Abstract: Current computational models for humour recognition and laughter generation in dialogue systems face significant limitations in explainability, context consideration and adaptability. This paper approaches these challenges by investigating how humour recognition develops in its earliest forms—during the first year of life. Drawing on developmental psychology and cognitive science, we propose a formal model incorporated within the KoS dialogue framework. This model captures how infants evaluate potential humour through knowledge-based appraisal and context-dependent modulation, including safety, emotional state, and social cues. Our model formalises dynamic knowledge updates during the dyadic interaction. We believe that this formal model can serve as the basis for developing more natural humour appreciation capabilities in dialogue systems and can be implemented in a robotic platform.

## introduction laughter serves as a critical non-verbal component in human interaction, signalling recognition of incongruity and creating social affiliation @xcite . integrating laughter capabilities into dialogue systems remains challenging due to the subjective and contextdependent nature of humour. current approaches to laughter generation predominantly rely on neural network models, including reinforcement learning @xcite and long short-term memory networks @xcite , which generate responses based on latent values but often lack interpretability. recent work has examined temporal sequence patterns of laughter in dialogues @xcite , developed virtual conversational agents that predict appropriate moments for smiling or laughing @xcite , and proposed attention mechanisms that analyse wording context to place contextually appropriate laughter @xcite . however, these approaches face significant limitations: 1) limited explainability: neural approaches often function as black boxes, making it difficult to understand the precise reasoning behind laughter generation; 2) inadequate consideration of context: many models fail to account for the rich multimodal social signals, safety factors and mood that inform humour interpretation, and 3) poor cognitive adaptability: current systems struggle to adjust to shifting conversational contexts and participant relationships. we propose a formal model based on a principled, mechanistic-approach to explicate the development of humour recognition and laughter production. we use an example extracted from the rollins corpus to demonstrate the model's capacity to explain the emergence of specific emotional responses in infants towards each caregiver-produced event. by focusing on the first year of life, when infants begin to perceive and respond to incongruity, we can identify the core cognitive mechanisms that underlie humour appreciation before they become overly complex or culturally specific. the paper is organised as follows. first, in section 2, we review foundational theories of humour development in infants and a potential framework to model this humour interaction. next, we propose our research questions in section 3 and describe our methodological approach in section 4. we then present our formal model in section 5, detailing both its architecture and appraisal process, followed by a comprehensive case study in section 6. finally, we conclude our work and its contributions (section 7), and discuss its limitations and directions for future research (section 8). ## research questions given the interplay of cognitive, affective and social factors in infant humour interaction presented on our literature review, we hypothesise that humour interactions in infants can be modelled using the architecture of the occ model @xcite , widely used to model emotions in artificial intelligence and which has significantly influenced computational models of emotion (e.g., @xcite @xcite ). this model emphasises that the emotional responses arise from cognitive appraisals of events, agents, and objects based on the agent's beliefs or relationship with its environment (appraisal @xmath0. corresponding cognitive and/or behavioural changes occur alongside the derived affect affect consequence, and these changes influence the next appraisal process, forming a loop. this framework, therefore, can serve as a basic approach to model an infant's dynamic humour appreciation -the transition from experiencing humour events with cognitive challenge to appreciating them and generating emotional response arises from local humour laughable (predicting humour events or applying updated knowledge to create novel humour). however, as the occ model covers all emotions and is also not specific to infants, additional refinements are needed. more detailed components require specification, including: 1) how to represent infant knowledge and detect conflicts between this knowledge and what they perceive; 2) how infants combine self-generated appraisals with contextual factors; and 3) how different emotional responses to humour events generate corresponding adaptations in knowledge and behaviour. ## method based on our hypothesis, we propose an occinspired model of infant-caregiver humour interaction using the kos foot_0 dialogue framework @xcite @xcite @xcite @xcite (see appendix a.3 for details) which is formulated within type theory with records (ttr) @xcite @xcite (see appendix a.1 for details). and we exemplify our model by analysing one long-sequence of a play interaction extracted from the rollins corpora @xcite . ## illustration to illustrate how our model can be applied to concrete cases, we sketch an analysis of a sequence from the rollins corpus involving a 9-month-old infant and his caregiver (see figures 2 , 3 , and 4 ). in this interaction, the caregiver repeatedly performs a humorous action -throwing a toy circle from her head -which violates normal object use, creating a natural experiment in humour development. this example demonstrates how our formalism captures the dynamic process of humour recognition, from initial confusion to emerging laughter and anticipatory appreciation, illustrating the interplay between knowledge and contextual factors. ## conclusion this paper proposes a formal model of humour recognition in infant-caregiver interactions, specifically designed to address key limitations in current computational approaches to humour in dialogue systems, including limited explainability, inadequate consideration of context, and poor cognitive adaptability. to address these challenges, we designed a formal model inspired by the occ model's three-stage appraisal process and specified each appraisal stage based on existing psychological theories of early humour appreciation. this formal model offers enhanced explainability by explicitly tracing how an infant's specific emotional response arises from the interplay of three contextual factors (safety factors, social cues, and current emotional state) and their dynamic cognitive state (updates to common-sense and episodic knowledge during the interaction). this detailed mechanistic approach illustrates why the same event might elicit different emotional responses from an infant at different times, based on their evolving internal state. we also introduce a novel approach to dialogue modeling by combining the kos framework with ttr. we utilize kos to construct a dual-state for each participant, representing both their public (external perceptions and productions) and private (internal knowledge and mood) states, exemplifying how two agents perceive, process, adapt, and respond to the communicative event their interlocutor produces. ttr, in turn, is employed to formally represent multimodal events, an agent's knowledge state, and their emotional state.