Getting Serious about Humor: Crafting Humor Datasets with Unfunny Large Language Models

Zachary Horvitz, Jingru Chen, Rahul Aditya, Harshvardhan Srivastava, Robert West, Zhou Yu, Kathleen McKeown


Abstract
Humor is a fundamental facet of human cognition and interaction. Yet, despite recent advances in natural language processing, humor detection remains a challenging task that is complicated by the scarcity of datasets that pair humorous texts with similar non-humorous counterparts. We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can generate synthetic data for humor detection via editing texts. We benchmark LLMs on an existing human dataset and show that current LLMs display an impressive ability to “unfun” jokes, as judged by humans and as measured on the downstream task of humor detection. We extend our approach to a code-mixed English-Hindi humor dataset where we find that GPT-4’s synthetic data is highly rated by bilingual annotators and provides challenging adversarial examples for humor classifiers.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-short.76
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
855–869
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-short.76
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-short.76
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zachary Horvitz, Jingru Chen, Rahul Aditya, Harshvardhan Srivastava, Robert West, Zhou Yu, and Kathleen McKeown. 2024. Getting Serious about Humor: Crafting Humor Datasets with Unfunny Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 855–869, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Getting Serious about Humor: Crafting Humor Datasets with Unfunny Large Language Models (Horvitz et al., ACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-short.76.pdf