It turns out, not a joke, that there is a research group working on “Computer-Assisted Translation of Humorous Wordplay”. They can be found over at punderstanding.of.ai and it’s, again, not a joke.
Just from browsing around here I learned a ton about this field.
- Here’s one on a model called PunCAT that tries to translate puns in language. The tool can be found on Github.
- There’s an attempt to predict humour by using Gaussian Processes. The dataset for this task is called SemEval-2017 and it contains sentences like “Money is the Root of All Evil. For more info, send $10.”. The question is, can humor be detected?
- There’s a contest called JokeR that’s all about “Automatic Pun and Humour Translation”.
- Through this group, I also learned that there is an International Journal of Humor Research
Today I learned.
It does seem like a very hard domain to expect results from, just because natural language is so flexible but also because humor depends so much on culture/background that I’m having trouble thinking of a ground truth.