For a Fistful of Puns: Evaluating a Puns in Multiword Expressions Identification Algorithm Without Dedicated Dataset

Julien Bezançon, Gaël Lejeune


Abstract
Machine Translation systems has always faced challenges such as multiword expressions (MWEs) and wordplays, which impact their performance, being idiosyncratic and pervasive across different languages. In this context, we seek to explore the nature of puns created from multiword expressions (PMWEs), characterized by the creation of a wordplay from a source MWE to recontextualize it or to give it a humorous touch. Little work has been done on PMWEs in NLP. To address this challenge, we introduce ASMR, an alignment-based PMWE identification and tagging algorithm. We offer an in-depth analysis of three different approaches to ASMR, each created to identify different types of PMWEs. In the absence of PMWE-related datasets and resources, we proceed to a snowclone detection task in English.We also perform a MWE identification task in 26 languages to evaluate ASMR performances across different languages. We show that ASMR exhibits state-of-the-art results for the snowclone detection task and produces interesting results with the MWE identification task. These results may indicate that ASMR is suitable for a PMWE identification task.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.443
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8350–8370
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.443/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.443
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Julien Bezançon and Gaël Lejeune. 2025. For a Fistful of Puns: Evaluating a Puns in Multiword Expressions Identification Algorithm Without Dedicated Dataset. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 8350–8370, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
For a Fistful of Puns: Evaluating a Puns in Multiword Expressions Identification Algorithm Without Dedicated Dataset (Bezançon & Lejeune, Findings 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.443.pdf
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