Homophonic Pun Generation with Lexically Constrained Rewriting

Zhiwei Yu, Hongyu Zang, Xiaojun Wan


Abstract
Punning is a creative way to make conversation enjoyable and literary writing elegant. In this paper, we focus on the task of generating a pun sentence given a pair of homophones. We first find the constraint words supporting the semantic incongruity for a sentence. Then we rewrite the sentence with explicit positive and negative constraints. Our model achieves the state-of-the-art results in both automatic and human evaluations. We further make an error analysis and discuss the challenges for the computational pun models.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.229
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2870–2876
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.229
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.229
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhiwei Yu, Hongyu Zang, and Xiaojun Wan. 2020. Homophonic Pun Generation with Lexically Constrained Rewriting. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 2870–2876, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Homophonic Pun Generation with Lexically Constrained Rewriting (Yu et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.229.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38939190