“Judge me by my size (noun), do you?” YodaLib: A Demographic-Aware Humor Generation Framework

Aparna Garimella, Carmen Banea, Nabil Hossain, Rada Mihalcea


Abstract
The subjective nature of humor makes computerized humor generation a challenging task. We propose an automatic humor generation framework for filling the blanks in Mad Libs® stories, while accounting for the demographic backgrounds of the desired audience. We collect a dataset consisting of such stories, which are filled in and judged by carefully selected workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk. We build upon the BERT platform to predict location-biased word fillings in incomplete sentences, and we fine-tune BERT to classify location-specific humor in a sentence. We leverage these components to produce YodaLib, a fully-automated Mad Libs style humor generation framework, which selects and ranks appropriate candidate words and sentences in order to generate a coherent and funny story tailored to certain demographics. Our experimental results indicate that YodaLib outperforms a previous semi-automated approach proposed for this task, while also surpassing human annotators in both qualitative and quantitative analyses.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.253
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2814–2825
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.253
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.253
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aparna Garimella, Carmen Banea, Nabil Hossain, and Rada Mihalcea. 2020. “Judge me by my size (noun), do you?” YodaLib: A Demographic-Aware Humor Generation Framework. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 2814–2825, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
“Judge me by my size (noun), do you?” YodaLib: A Demographic-Aware Humor Generation Framework (Garimella et al., COLING 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.253.pdf