Identifying Humor in Reviews using Background Text Sources

Alex Morales, Chengxiang Zhai


Abstract
We study the problem of automatically identifying humorous text from a new kind of text data, i.e., online reviews. We propose a generative language model, based on the theory of incongruity, to model humorous text, which allows us to leverage background text sources, such as Wikipedia entry descriptions, and enables construction of multiple features for identifying humorous reviews. Evaluation of these features using supervised learning for classifying reviews into humorous and non-humorous reviews shows that the features constructed based on the proposed generative model are much more effective than the major features proposed in the existing literature, allowing us to achieve almost 86% accuracy. These humorous review predictions can also supply good indicators for identifying helpful reviews.
Anthology ID:
D17-1051
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
492–501
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1051
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1051
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alex Morales and Chengxiang Zhai. 2017. Identifying Humor in Reviews using Background Text Sources. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 492–501, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Identifying Humor in Reviews using Background Text Sources (Morales & Zhai, EMNLP 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1051.pdf