Duluth at SemEval-2017 Task 7 : Puns Upon a Midnight Dreary, Lexical Semantics for the Weak and Weary

Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations (SemEval-2017), pages 416–420, Vancouver, Canada, August 3 - 4, 2017. c⃝2017 Association for Computational Linguistics Duluth at SemEval-2017 Task 7: Puns Upon a Midnight Dreary, Lexical Semantics for the Weak and Weary Ted Pedersen Department of Computer Science University of Minnesota Duluth, MN 55812 USA tpederse@d.umn.edu Abstract This paper describes the Duluth systems that participated in SemEval-2017 Task 7 : Detection and Interpretation of English Puns. The Duluth systems participated in all three subtasks, and relied on methods that included word sense disambiguation and measures of semantic relatedness. 1 Introduction Puns represent a broad class of humorous word play. This paper focuses on two types of puns, homographic and heterographic. A homographic pun is characterized by an os- cillation between two senses of a single word, each of which leads to a different but valid interpreta- tion: I’d like to tell you a chemistry joke but I’m afraid of your reaction. Here the oscillation is between two senses of reaction. The first that comes to mind is perhaps that of a person revealing their true feelings about something (how they react), but then the relation- ship to chemistry emerges and the reader realizes that reaction can also mean the chemical sense, where substances change into others. Homographic puns can also be created via com- pounding: He had a collection of candy that was in mint condition. The pun relies on the oscillation between the fla- vor mint and the compound mint condition, where candy interacts with mint and mint condition inter- acts with collection. A heterographic pun relies on a different kind of oscillation, that is between two words that nearly sound alike, rhyme, or are nearly spelled the same. The best angle from which to solve a problem is the try angle. Here the oscillation is between try angle and tri- angle, where try suggests that the best way to solve a problem is to try harder, and triangle is (perhaps) the best kind of angle. This example illustrates one of the main chal- lenges of heterographic puns, and that is identify- ing multi word expressions that are used as a kind of compound, but without being a standard or typ- ical compound (like the very non-standard try an- gle). One reading treats try angle as a kind of mis- spelled version of triangle while the other treats them as two distinct words (try and angle). There is also a kind of oscillation between senses here, since try angle can waver back and forth between the geometric sense and the one of making effort. During our informal study of both hetero- graphic and homographic puns, we observed a fairly clear pattern where a punned word will oc- cur towards the end of a sentence and has a sense that is semantically related to an earlier word, and another sense that fits the immediate context in which it occurs. It often seemed that the sense that fits the immediate context is …

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