Humorous texts can be of different forms such as punchlines, puns, or funny stories. Existing humor classification systems have been dealing with such diverse forms by treating them independently. In this paper, we argue that different forms of humor share a common background either in terms of vocabulary or constructs. As a consequence, it is likely that classification performance can be improved by jointly tackling different humor types. Hence, we design a shared-private multitask architecture following a transfer learning paradigm and perform experiments over four gold standard datasets. Empirical results steadily confirm our hypothesis by demonstrating statistically-significant improvements over baselines and accounting for new state-of-the-art figures for two datasets.

Nous proposons une idée originale pour exploiter les relations entre les classes dans les problèmes multiclasses. Nous définissons deux architectures multitâches de type one-vs-rest qui combinent des ensembles de classifieurs appris dans une configuration multitâche en utilisant des réseaux de neurones. Les expériences menées sur six jeux de données pour la classification des sentiments, des émotions, des thématiques et des relations lexico-sémantiques montrent que nos architectures améliorent constamment les performances par rapport aux stratégies de l’état de l’art de type one-vsrest et concurrencent fortement les autres stratégies multiclasses.

Most social media platforms grant users freedom of speech by allowing them to freely express their thoughts, beliefs, and opinions. Although this represents incredible and unique communication opportunities, it also presents important challenges. Online racism is such an example. In this study, we present a supervised learning strategy to detect racist language on Twitter based on word embedding that incorporate demographic (Age, Gender, and Location) information. Our methodology achieves reasonable classification accuracy over a gold standard dataset (F1=76.3%) and significantly improves over the classification performance of demographic-agnostic models.

Some authors (Simard et al.; Melamed; Danielsson & Mühlenbock) have suggested measures of similarity of words in different languages so as to find extra clues for alignment of parallel texts. Cognate words, like ‘Parliament’ and ‘Parlement’, in English and French respectively, provide extra anchors that help to improve the quality of the alignment. In this paper, we will extend an alignment algorithm proposed by Ribeiro et al. using typical contiguous and non-contiguous sequences of characters extracted using a statistically sound method (Dias et al.). With these typical sequences, we are able to find more reliable correspondence points and improve the alignment quality without recurring to heuristics to identify cognates.