Humor is an intricate part of verbal communication and dealing with this kind of phenomenon is essential to building systems that can process language at large with all of its complexities. In this paper, we introduce Puntuguese, a new corpus of punning humor in Portuguese, motivated by previous works showing that currently available corpora for this language are still unfit for Machine Learning due to data leakage. Puntuguese comprises 4,903 manually-gathered punning one-liners in Brazilian and European Portuguese. To create negative examples that differ exclusively in terms of funniness, we carried out a micro-editing process, in which all jokes were edited by fluent Portuguese speakers to make the texts unfunny. Finally, we did some experiments on Humor Recognition, showing that Puntuguese is considerably more difficult than the previous corpus, achieving an F1-Score of 68.9%. With this new dataset, we hope to enable research not only in NLP but also in other fields that are interested in studying humor; thus, the data is publicly available.

Dealing with humor is an important step to develop Natural Language Processing tools capable of handling sophisticated semantic and pragmatic knowledge. In this context, this PhD thesis focuses on the automatic generation and recognition of verbal punning humor in Portuguese, which is still an underdeveloped language when compared to English. One of the main goals of this research is to conciliate Natural Language Generation computational models with existing theories of humor from the Humanities while avoiding mere generation by including contextual information into the generation process. Another point that is of utmost importance is the inclusion of the listener as an active part in the process of understanding and creating humor; we hope to achieve this by using concepts from Recommender Systems in our methods. Ultimately, we want to not only advance the current state-of-the-art in humor generation and recognition, but also to help the general Portuguese-speaking research community with methods, tools and resources that may aid in the development of further techniques for this language. We also expect our systems to provide insightful ideas about how humor is created and perceived by both humans and machines.