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Dear Prof. Lydia Chilton,
I'm one of the organizers of the Workshop on Computational Humor (CHumhttps://chumweb.org/), a workshop series held at conferences affiliated with the ACL. I'm currently at the University of Chicago (just joined), and I recently had the pleasure of meeting your student Sean Kim at ICCC 2026. Our conversation reminded me how consistently insightful your ideas on computational AI have been, which is why I'm writing.
On behalf of the organizing committee, I'd like to ask whether you would consider participating in the 2027 edition of our workshop as a keynote speaker. The goal of CHum is to advance research into the computational modeling of humor, drawing on insights from the social sciences and humanities where they can inform our models. Your work stands out to us precisely because it does both: it is rigorously computational while taking seriously what the humanities and creative practice have to say about how humor actually works. That is exactly the kind of perspective we want our attendees – mostly researchers in computer science and AI – to hear.
Past speakers have included Tony Veale, a pioneer of computational creativity; Salvatore Attardo, the linguist behind the General Theory of Verbal Humor; Gil Greengross, an evolutionary psychologist; Laura Little, a legal scholar and author of “Regulating Funny”; and Joe Toplyn, an Emmy-winning comedy writer and Witscipt developer. Given your research on computational approaches to creativity and humor, we would love to host you for an invited talk.
We will be proposing to the ACL Workshop Chairs that CHum 2027 be held as part of one of the following conferences, with a preference for NAACL or ACL:
* EACL 2027 in Athens, March 9-14 * COLING 2027 in Macau, May 9-14 * NAACL 2027 in San Francisco, June 1-5 * ACL 2027 in Kyoto, August 17-22 * EMNLP 2027 in Central America, early November
The final venue, workshop date, and modality (online-only or hybrid) will be determined by the ACL Workshop Chairs. We would in any event cover your workshop registration fee for virtual attendance and, if we are successful in obtaining funding from sponsors, may alternatively be able to cover travel and registration expenses for in-person attendance.
Thank you for considering this provisional invitation. It would be wonderful to have you join us, and I look forward to your response.
Regards, Ori Amir Chicago Center for Computational Social Science, University of Chicago