Uncertainty and Surprisal Jointly Deliver the Punchline: Exploiting Incongruity-Based Features for Humor Recognition

Yubo Xie, Junze Li, Pearl Pu


Abstract
Humor recognition has been widely studied as a text classification problem using data-driven approaches. However, most existing work does not examine the actual joke mechanism to understand humor. We break down any joke into two distinct components: the set-up and the punchline, and further explore the special relationship between them. Inspired by the incongruity theory of humor, we model the set-up as the part developing semantic uncertainty, and the punchline disrupting audience expectations. With increasingly powerful language models, we were able to feed the set-up along with the punchline into the GPT-2 language model, and calculate the uncertainty and surprisal values of the jokes. By conducting experiments on the SemEval 2021 Task 7 dataset, we found that these two features have better capabilities of telling jokes from non-jokes, compared with existing baselines.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-short.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short 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:
33–39
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.6
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-short.6
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yubo Xie, Junze Li, and Pearl Pu. 2021. Uncertainty and Surprisal Jointly Deliver the Punchline: Exploiting Incongruity-Based Features for Humor Recognition. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 33–39, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Uncertainty and Surprisal Jointly Deliver the Punchline: Exploiting Incongruity-Based Features for Humor Recognition (Xie et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
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https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-short.6.pdf
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