How Did This Get Funded?! Automatically Identifying Quirky Scientific Achievements

Chen Shani, Nadav Borenstein, Dafna Shahaf


Abstract
Humor is an important social phenomenon, serving complex social and psychological functions. However, despite being studied for millennia humor is computationally not well understood, often considered an AI-complete problem. In this work, we introduce a novel setting in humor mining: automatically detecting funny and unusual scientific papers. We are inspired by the Ig Nobel prize, a satirical prize awarded annually to celebrate funny scientific achievements (example past winner: “Are cows more likely to lie down the longer they stand?”). This challenging task has unique characteristics that make it particularly suitable for automatic learning. We construct a dataset containing thousands of funny papers and use it to learn classifiers, combining findings from psychology and linguistics with recent advances in NLP. We use our models to identify potentially funny papers in a large dataset of over 630,000 articles. The results demonstrate the potential of our methods, and more broadly the utility of integrating state-of-the-art NLP methods with insights from more traditional disciplines
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.2
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14–28
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.2
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.2
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chen Shani, Nadav Borenstein, and Dafna Shahaf. 2021. How Did This Get Funded?! Automatically Identifying Quirky Scientific Achievements. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 14–28, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
How Did This Get Funded?! Automatically Identifying Quirky Scientific Achievements (Shani et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.2.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.2.mp4
Code
 nadavborenstein/Iggy