ELiRF-UPV at SemEval-2017 Task 7: Pun Detection and Interpretation

Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations (SemEval-2017), pages 440–443, Vancouver, Canada, August 3 - 4, 2017. c⃝2017 Association for Computational Linguistics ELiRF-UPV at SemEval-2017 Task 7: Pun Detection and Interpretation Llu´ıs-F. Hurtado, Encarna Segarra, Ferran Pla, Pascual Carrasco, Jos´e- ´Angel Gonz´alez Universitat Polit`ecnica de Val`encia Cam´ı de Vera sn, 46022, Val`encia {lhurtado|esegarra|fpla|pascargo|jogonba2}@dsic.upv.es Abstract This paper describes the participation of ELiRF-UPV team at task 7 (subtask 2: homographic pun detection and subtask 3: homographic pun interpretation) of Se- mEval2017. Our approach is based on the use of word embeddings to find related words in a sentence and a version of the Lesk algorithm to establish relationships between synsets. The results obtained are in line with those obtained by the other participants and they encourage us to con- tinue working on this problem. 1 Introduction Pun is a figure of speech that consists of a de- liberate confusion of similar words or phrases for rhetorical effect, whether humorous or serious. In (Giorgadze, 2014), the author analyzed, from a linguistic point of view, the pun as one of the cat- egories of wordplay and its manifestation in one- liner jokes in English. Pun is a way of using the characteristics of the language to cause a word, a sentence or a discourse to involve two or more different meanings. Therefore, humorous or any other effects created by puns depend upon the am- biguities of these words. Pun detection is closely related to the Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) problem, but in this case we need to select two senses of the pun (Miller and Gurevych, 2015; Miller and Turkovi, 2016). The interpretation of puns has been subject of study in theoretical linguistics, and has led to a small but growing body of research in computa- tional linguistics. In the task 7 of the SemEval 2017 competition, organizers proposed three chal- lenges (subtasks): pun detection, pun location and pun interpretation (Miller et al., 2017). In this work, we present a proposal for two sub- tasks: homographic pun location (subtask2), and homographic pun interpretation (subtask3). Our proposal for both subtasks lies in the hy- pothesis that the two senses of the pun in the sen- tence are possible thanks to the coexistence of the pun with other words in that sentence that are se- mantically close to the pun. According to this hy- pothesis, our method for pun detection consists of finding pairs of words more semantically related in the sentence. In addition, our method for pun interpretation is based on the detection of words in the sentence, different from the pun, that help to find the two senses of the pun. The selection of these words is also based on the criterion of the semantic proximity to the pun. 2 Subtask 2: Pun location process Pun localization consists of identifying which word is the pun given a sentence that contains a pun. Our proposal is based on two hypotheses: i) to find the most semantically related pair of words (one of these …

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