Distribution-Based Measures of Surprise for Creative Language: Experiments with Humor and Metaphor

Razvan C. Bunescu, Oseremen O. Uduehi


Abstract
Novelty or surprise is a fundamental attribute of creative output. As such, we postulate that a writer’s creative use of language leads to word choices and, more importantly, corresponding semantic structures that are unexpected for the reader. In this paper we investigate measures of surprise that rely solely on word distributions computed by language models and show empirically that creative language such as humor and metaphor is strongly correlated with surprise. Surprisingly at first, information content is observed to be at least as good a predictor of creative language as any of the surprise measures investigated. However, the best prediction performance is obtained when information and surprise measures are combined, showing that surprise measures capture an aspect of creative language that goes beyond information content.
Anthology ID:
2022.flp-1.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FLP)
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid)
Editors:
Debanjan Ghosh, Beata Beigman Klebanov, Smaranda Muresan, Anna Feldman, Soujanya Poria, Tuhin Chakrabarty
Venue:
Fig-Lang
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
68–78
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.flp-1.10
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.flp-1.10
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Razvan C. Bunescu and Oseremen O. Uduehi. 2022. Distribution-Based Measures of Surprise for Creative Language: Experiments with Humor and Metaphor. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FLP), pages 68–78, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (Hybrid). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Distribution-Based Measures of Surprise for Creative Language: Experiments with Humor and Metaphor (Bunescu & Uduehi, Fig-Lang 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.flp-1.10.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.flp-1.10.mp4