Punny Captions: Witty Wordplay in Image Descriptions

Arjun Chandrasekaran, Devi Parikh, Mohit Bansal


Abstract
Wit is a form of rich interaction that is often grounded in a specific situation (e.g., a comment in response to an event). In this work, we attempt to build computational models that can produce witty descriptions for a given image. Inspired by a cognitive account of humor appreciation, we employ linguistic wordplay, specifically puns, in image descriptions. We develop two approaches which involve retrieving witty descriptions for a given image from a large corpus of sentences, or generating them via an encoder-decoder neural network architecture. We compare our approach against meaningful baseline approaches via human studies and show substantial improvements. Moreover, in a Turing test style evaluation, people find the image descriptions generated by our model to be slightly wittier than human-written witty descriptions when the human is subject to similar constraints as the model regarding word usage and style.
Anthology ID:
N18-2121
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
770–775
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-2121
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-2121
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Arjun Chandrasekaran, Devi Parikh, and Mohit Bansal. 2018. Punny Captions: Witty Wordplay in Image Descriptions. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers), pages 770–775, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Punny Captions: Witty Wordplay in Image Descriptions (Chandrasekaran et al., NAACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-2121.pdf
Dataset:
 N18-2121.Datasets.zip