Current AI programs are devoid of humor, but joking around is central to human social interaction. So University of Cincinnati researchers built a computer program that can get a joke — based on a simple pun.

To teach the program to spot jokes, the researchers first gave it a database of words, extracted from a children’s dictionary to keep things simple, and then supplied examples of how words can be related to one another in different ways to create different meanings.

When presented with a new passage, the program looks for words that don’t belong and searches a digital pronunciation guide for similar-sounding words. If any of those words fits in better with the rest of the sentence, it flags the passage as a joke.