Abstract
We tackle the problem of generating a pun sentence given a pair of homophones (e.g., “died” and “dyed”). Puns are by their very nature statistically anomalous and not amenable to most text generation methods that are supervised by a large corpus. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised approach to pun generation based on lots of raw (unhumorous) text and a surprisal principle. Specifically, we posit that in a pun sentence, there is a strong association between the pun word (e.g., “dyed”) and the distant context, but a strong association between the alternative word (e.g., “died”) and the immediate context. We instantiate the surprisal principle in two ways: (i) as a measure based on the ratio of probabilities given by a language model, and (ii) a retrieve-and-edit approach based on words suggested by a skip-gram model. Based on human evaluation, our retrieve-and-edit approach generates puns successfully 30% of the time, doubling the success rate of a neural generation baseline.- Anthology ID:
- N19-1172
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2019
- Address:
- Minneapolis, Minnesota
- Editors:
- Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
- Venue:
- NAACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1734–1744
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/N19-1172
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/N19-1172
- Cite (ACL):
- He He, Nanyun Peng, and Percy Liang. 2019. Pun Generation with Surprise. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 1734–1744, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Pun Generation with Surprise (He et al., NAACL 2019)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_acl24_videos/N19-1172.pdf
- Code
- hhexiy/pungen + additional community code
- Data
- BookCorpus