We aim to automatically identify human action reasons in online videos. We focus on the widespread genre of lifestyle vlogs, in which people perform actions while verbally describing them. We introduce and make publicly available the WhyAct dataset, consisting of 1,077 visual actions manually annotated with their reasons. We describe a multimodal model that leverages visual and textual information to automatically infer the reasons corresponding to an action presented in the video.

We introduce LifeQA, a benchmark dataset for video question answering that focuses on day-to-day real-life situations. Current video question answering datasets consist of movies and TV shows. However, it is well-known that these visual domains are not representative of our day-to-day lives. Movies and TV shows, for example, benefit from professional camera movements, clean editing, crisp audio recordings, and scripted dialog between professional actors. While these domains provide a large amount of data for training models, their properties make them unsuitable for testing real-life question answering systems. Our dataset, by contrast, consists of video clips that represent only real-life scenarios. We collect 275 such video clips and over 2.3k multiple-choice questions. In this paper, we analyze the challenging but realistic aspects of LifeQA, and we apply several state-of-the-art video question answering models to provide benchmarks for future research. The full dataset is publicly available at https://lit.eecs.umich.edu/lifeqa/.

This paper presents the development of a corpus of 30,000 Spanish tweets that were crowd-annotated with humor value and funniness score. The corpus contains approximately 38.6% of humorous tweets with an average score of 2.04 in a scale from 1 to 5 for the humorous tweets. The corpus has been used in an automatic humor recognition and analysis competition, obtaining encouraging results from the participants.

Sarcasm is often expressed through several verbal and non-verbal cues, e.g., a change of tone, overemphasis in a word, a drawn-out syllable, or a straight looking face. Most of the recent work in sarcasm detection has been carried out on textual data. In this paper, we argue that incorporating multimodal cues can improve the automatic classification of sarcasm. As a first step towards enabling the development of multimodal approaches for sarcasm detection, we propose a new sarcasm dataset, Multimodal Sarcasm Detection Dataset (MUStARD), compiled from popular TV shows. MUStARD consists of audiovisual utterances annotated with sarcasm labels. Each utterance is accompanied by its context of historical utterances in the dialogue, which provides additional information on the scenario where the utterance occurs. Our initial results show that the use of multimodal information can reduce the relative error rate of sarcasm detection by up to 12.9% in F-score when compared to the use of individual modalities. The full dataset is publicly available for use at https://github.com/soujanyaporia/MUStARD.

Computational Humor involves several tasks, such as humor recognition, humor generation, and humor scoring, for which it is useful to have human-curated data. In this work we present a corpus of 27,000 tweets written in Spanish and crowd-annotated by their humor value and funniness score, with about four annotations per tweet, tagged by 1,300 people over the Internet. It is equally divided between tweets coming from humorous and non-humorous accounts. The inter-annotator agreement Krippendorff’s alpha value is 0.5710. The dataset is available for general usage and can serve as a basis for humor detection and as a first step to tackle subjectivity.

False friends are words in two languages that look or sound similar, but have different meanings. They are a common source of confusion among language learners. Methods to detect them automatically do exist, however they make use of large aligned bilingual corpora, which are hard to find and expensive to build, or encounter problems dealing with infrequent words. In this work we propose a high coverage method that uses word vector representations to build a false friends classifier for any pair of languages, which we apply to the particular case of Spanish and Portuguese. The required resources are a large corpus for each language and a small bilingual lexicon for the pair.