KoWit-24: A Richly Annotated Dataset of Wordplay in News Headlines

Alexander Baranov, Anna Palatkina, Yulia Makovka, Pavel Braslavski


Abstract
We present KoWit-24, a dataset with fine-grained annotation of wordplay in 2,700 Russian news headlines. KoWit-24 annotations include the presence of wordplay, its type, wordplay anchors, and words/phrases the wordplay refers to. Unlike the majority of existing humor collections of canned jokes, KoWit-24 provides wordplay contexts – each headline is accompanied by the news lead and summary. The most common type of wordplay in the dataset is the transformation of collocations, idioms, and named entities – the mechanism that has been underrepresented in previous humor datasets. Our experiments with five LLMs show that there is ample room for improvement in wordplay detection and interpretation tasks. The dataset and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/Humor-Research/KoWit-24
Anthology ID:
2025.ranlp-1.15
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era
Month:
September
Year:
2025
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Galia Angelova, Maria Kunilovskaya, Marie Escribe, Ruslan Mitkov
Venue:
RANLP
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
125–132
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.15/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alexander Baranov, Anna Palatkina, Yulia Makovka, and Pavel Braslavski. 2025. KoWit-24: A Richly Annotated Dataset of Wordplay in News Headlines. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing - Natural Language Processing in the Generative AI Era, pages 125–132, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
KoWit-24: A Richly Annotated Dataset of Wordplay in News Headlines (Baranov et al., RANLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.ranlp-1.15.pdf