SemEval-2017 Task 7: Detection and Interpretation of English Puns

Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations (SemEval-2017), pages 58–68, Vancouver, Canada, August 3 - 4, 2017. c⃝2017 Association for Computational Linguistics SemEval-2017 Task 7: Detection and Interpretation of English Puns Tristan Miller*† and Christian F. Hempelmann† and Iryna Gurevych* *Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab (UKP-TUDA/UKP-DIPF) Department of Computer Science Technische Universität Darmstadt https://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de †Ontological Semantic Technology Lab Texas A&M University-Commerce http://www.tamuc.edu/ontology Abstract A pun is a form of wordplay in which a word suggests two or more meanings by exploit- ing polysemy, homonymy, or phonological similarity to another word, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. Though a recurrent and expected feature in many dis- course types, puns stymie traditional ap- proaches to computational lexical semantics because they violate their one-sense-per- context assumption. This paper describes the first competitive evaluation for the auto- matic detection, location, and interpretation of puns. We describe the motivation for these tasks, the evaluation methods, and the manually annotated data set. Finally, we present an overview and discussion of the participating systems’ methodologies, resources, and results. 1 Introduction Word sense disambiguation (WSD), the task of identifying a word’s meaning in context, has long been recognized as an important task in compu- tational linguistics, and has been the focus of a considerable number of Senseval/SemEval evalu- ation tasks. Traditional approaches to WSD rest on the assumption that there is a single, unambigu- ous communicative intention underlying each word in the document. However, there exists a class of language constructs known as puns, in which lexical-semantic ambiguity is a deliberate effect of the communication act. That is, the speaker or writer intends for a certain word or other lexical item to be interpreted as simultaneously carrying two or more separate meanings. Though puns are a recurrent and expected feature in many discourse types, they have attracted relatively little attention in the fields of computational linguistics and nat- ural language processing in general, or WSD in particular. In this document, we describe a shared task for evaluating computational approaches to the detection and semantic interpretation of puns. A pun is a form of wordplay in which one sign (e.g., a word or phrase) suggests two or more mean- ings by exploiting polysemy, homonymy, or phono- logical similarity to another sign, for an intended hu- morous or rhetorical effect (Aarons, 2017; Hempel- mann and Miller, 2017). For example, the first of the following two punning jokes exploits the sound similarity between the surface sign “propane” and the latent target “profane”, while the second exploits contrasting meanings of the word “interest”: (1) When the church bought gas for their annual barbecue, proceeds went from the sacred to the propane. (2) I used to be a banker but I lost interest. Puns where the two meanings share the same pro- nunciation are known as homophonic or perfect, while those relying on similar- but not identical- sounding signs are known as heterophonic or im- perfect. Where the signs are considered as written rather than spoken sequences, a similar distinction can …

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