Is There a Connection Between Machines and Language?

We're going to have to go beyond puns to the more unstructured and subtle humor that we humans engage in pretty regularly. The average English speaker knows tens of thousands of words, breaks grammatical rules about as often as he follows them. Even if you can get past that, there's issues of ambiguity, context, and general common sense knowledge. This is very hard to encode into an algorithm. But in recent days, we may have cut a break. We may have found a back door. And this back door has a big sign on it, that's a hint. And the sign reads data.