Papers with humor understanding
ExPUNations: Augmenting Puns with Keywords and Explanations (2022.emnlp-main)
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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. |
Bridging the Creativity Understanding Gap: Small-Scale Human Alignment Enables Expert-Level Humor Ranking in LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Kuan Lok Zhou, Jiayi Chen, Siddharth Suresh, Reuben Narad, Timothy T. Rogers, Lalit K Jain, Robert D Nowak, Bob Mankoff, Jifan Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant limitations in understanding creative content, as demonstrated by Hessel et al. (2023)’s influential work on the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose humor understanding into three components and improve each by enhancing visual understanding through improved annotation and utilizing LLM-generated humor reasoning and explanations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 82.4% accuracy in caption ranking, significantly better than the previous 67% benchmark and matches the performance of world-renowned human experts in this domain. |
v-HUB: A Benchmark for Video Humor Understanding from Vision and Sound (2026.acl-long)
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Zhengpeng Shi, Yanpeng Zhao, Jianqun Zhou, Yuxuan Wang, Qinrong Cui, Wei Bi, Song-Chun Zhu, Bo Zhao, Zilong Zheng
| Challenge: | Humor enriches our daily lives and appears in many forms, from jokes and cartoons to comedies and viral videos. |
| Approach: | They introduce a video humor understanding benchmark to test their ability to understand humor from visual cues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed video humor understanding benchmark is based on a collection of short videos . it features rich annotations and a study of environmental sound that can enhance humor . |