Jiao Sun, Anjali Narayan-Chen, Shereen Oraby, Alessandra Cervone, Tagyoung Chung, Jing Huang, Yang Liu, Nanyun Peng
| Challenge: | Puns add the challenge of fusing commonsense and world knowledge with the ability to interpret lexical-semantic ambiguity. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment existing datasets with detailed crowdsourced annotations of puns, keywords and fine-grained funniness ratings to challenge current models' ability to understand and generate humor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks include explanation generation to aid with pun classification and keyword-conditioned pun generation to challenge state-of-the-art models' ability to understand and generate humor. |
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A Survey of Pun Generation: Datasets, Evaluations and Methodologies (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pun generation aims to modify linguistic elements in text to produce humour or evoke double meanings. |
| Approach: | They propose to review pun generation datasets and methods across different stages . pun generation aims to produce humour or evoke double meanings . |
| Outcome: | This paper summarises both automated and human evaluation metrics used to assess the quality of pun generation. |
“A good pun is its own reword”: Can Large Language Models Understand Puns? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on the understanding of puns in large language models (LLMs) have not explored the use of pun in creative writing and humor creation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use pun recognition, explanation and generation tasks to evaluate the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) they adopt automated evaluation metrics from prior research and introduce new evaluation methods and metrics that align more closely with human cognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods align more closely with human cognition than previous evaluation metrics. |
A Unified Framework for Pun Generation with Humor Principles (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for generating homophonic and homographic puns lack the linguistic attributes of successful puns to resolve the split-up in existing work. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to generate both homophonic and homographic puns to resolve the split-up in existing works by incorporating three linguistic attributes of puns into the language models: ambiguity, distinctiveness, and surprise. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model over strong baselines shows that it can generate both homophonic and homographic puns. |
AmbiPun: Generating Humorous Puns with Ambiguous Context (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating homographic puns are heavy-weighted due to the lack of training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a way to generate pun sentences that does not require training on existing puns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models and state-of-the-art models by a large margin. |
Pun Generation with Surprise (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we explore creative generation with a focus on puns. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised approach to generating puns using lots of raw text and a surprisal principle. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generates puns 30% of the time, doubles the neural generation baseline. |
Telling the Whole Story: A Manually Annotated Chinese Dataset for the Analysis of Humor in Jokes (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Humor plays important role in human communication, which makes it important problem for natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel annotation scheme to give scenarios of how humor arises in text . they report reasonable agreement between annotators and analyze the dataset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme gives scenarios of how humor arises in text . it contains key words that trigger humor, character relationship, scene, and humor categories . |
Pun Unintended: LLMs and the Illusion of Humor Understanding (2025.emnlp-main)
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Alessandro Zangari, Matteo Marcuzzo, Andrea Albarelli, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar, Jose Camacho-Collados
| Challenge: | Existing models for pun detection lack nuanced grasp typical of human interpretation. |
| Approach: | They analyze existing pun detection benchmarks and human evaluation across recent LLMs to find subtle changes in puns that mislead LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models lack the nuance typical of human interpretation and lack the depth of their analysis to detect puns. |
Context-Situated Pun Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
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Jiao Sun, Anjali Narayan-Chen, Shereen Oraby, Shuyang Gao, Tagyoung Chung, Jing Huang, Yang Liu, Nanyun Peng
| Challenge: | a new task for context-situated pun generation uses a given context to generate puns . human evaluation shows that 69% of top retrieved pun words can be used to generate context-based puns. |
| Approach: | They propose a task where puns are generated based on contextual keywords and pun words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates successful puns 31% of the time given a plausible tuple of context words and pun pairs. |
Punny Captions: Witty Wordplay in Image Descriptions (N18-2)
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| Challenge: | Developing computational models that can produce contextually witty image descriptions is challenging because of the large corpus of sentences that are not available for large scale corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose to use linguistic wordplay, specifically puns, to generate witty image descriptions from large corpus of sentences or encode them via an encoder-decoder neural network architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models perform better than baseline models using human data and show that they are slightly wittier than human-written witty descriptions. |
Pun-GAN: Generative Adversarial Network for Pun Generation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating pun sentences with word senses lack large-scale corpus for supervised learning . a pun is a clever and amusing use of a word with two meanings (word senses) |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial generative network for pun generation with a generator and a discriminator to distinguish between generated pun sentences and real sentences with specific word senses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network generates sentences that are more ambiguous and diverse in both automatic and human evaluation. |