“President Vows to Cut <Taxes> Hair”: Dataset and Analysis of Creative Text Editing for Humorous Headlines

Nabil Hossain, John Krumm, Michael Gamon


Abstract
We introduce, release, and analyze a new dataset, called Humicroedit, for research in computational humor. Our publicly available data consists of regular English news headlines paired with versions of the same headlines that contain simple replacement edits designed to make them funny. We carefully curated crowdsourced editors to create funny headlines and judges to score a to a total of 15,095 edited headlines, with five judges per headline. The simple edits, usually just a single word replacement, mean we can apply straightforward analysis techniques to determine what makes our edited headlines humorous. We show how the data support classic theories of humor, such as incongruity, superiority, and setup/punchline. Finally, we develop baseline classifiers that can predict whether or not an edited headline is funny, which is a first step toward automatically generating humorous headlines as an approach to creating topical humor.
Anthology ID:
N19-1012
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:
133–142
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1012
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1012
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nabil Hossain, John Krumm, and Michael Gamon. 2019. “President Vows to Cut Hair”: Dataset and Analysis of Creative Text Editing for Humorous Headlines. 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 133–142, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
“President Vows to Cut Hair”: Dataset and Analysis of Creative Text Editing for Humorous Headlines (Hossain et al., NAACL 2019)
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