The rJokes Dataset: a Large Scale Humor Collection

Orion Weller, Kevin Seppi


Abstract
Humor is a complicated language phenomenon that depends upon many factors, including topic, date, and recipient. Because of this variation, it can be hard to determine what exactly makes a joke humorous, leading to difficulties in joke identification and related tasks. Furthermore, current humor datasets are lacking in both joke variety and size, with almost all current datasets having less than 100k jokes. In order to alleviate this issue we compile a collection of over 550,000 jokes posted over an 11 year period on the Reddit r/Jokes subreddit (an online forum), providing a large scale humor dataset that can easily be used for a myriad of tasks. This dataset also provides quantitative metrics for the level of humor in each joke, as determined by subreddit user feedback. We explore this dataset through the years, examining basic statistics, most mentioned entities, and sentiment proportions. We also introduce this dataset as a task for future work, where models learn to predict the level of humor in a joke. On that task we provide strong state-of-the-art baseline models and show room for future improvement. We hope that this dataset will not only help those researching computational humor, but also help social scientists who seek to understand popular culture through humor.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.753
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
6136–6141
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.753
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Orion Weller and Kevin Seppi. 2020. The rJokes Dataset: a Large Scale Humor Collection. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6136–6141, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
The rJokes Dataset: a Large Scale Humor Collection (Weller & Seppi, LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.753.pdf