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

In this study, we focus on automatic humor detection, a highly relevant task for conversational AI. To date, there are several English datasets for this task, but little research on how models trained on them generalize and behave in the wild. To fill this gap, we carefully analyze existing datasets, train RoBERTa-based and Naïve Bayes classifiers on each of them, and test on the rest. Training and testing on the same dataset yields good results, but the transferability of the models varies widely. Models trained on datasets with jokes from different sources show better transferability, while the amount of training data has a smaller impact. The behavior of the models on out-of-domain data is unstable, suggesting that some of the models overfit, while others learn non-specific humor characteristics. An adversarial attack shows that models trained on pun datasets are less robust. We also evaluate the sense of humor of the chatGPT and Flan-UL2 models in a zero-shot scenario. The LLMs demonstrate competitive results on humor datasets and a more stable behavior on out-of-domain data. We believe that the obtained results will facilitate the development of new datasets and evaluation methodologies in the field of computational humor. We’ve made all the data from the study and the trained models publicly available at https://github.com/Humor-Research/Humor-detection.