A Neural Approach to Pun Generation

Zhiwei Yu, Jiwei Tan, Xiaojun Wan


Abstract
Automatic pun generation is an interesting and challenging text generation task. Previous efforts rely on templates or laboriously manually annotated pun datasets, which heavily constrains the quality and diversity of generated puns. Since sequence-to-sequence models provide an effective technique for text generation, it is promising to investigate these models on the pun generation task. In this paper, we propose neural network models for homographic pun generation, and they can generate puns without requiring any pun data for training. We first train a conditional neural language model from a general text corpus, and then generate puns from the language model with an elaborately designed decoding algorithm. Automatic and human evaluations show that our models are able to generate homographic puns of good readability and quality.
Anthology ID:
P18-1153
Volume:
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2018
Address:
Melbourne, Australia
Editors:
Iryna Gurevych, Yusuke Miyao
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1650–1660
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1153
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P18-1153
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhiwei Yu, Jiwei Tan, and Xiaojun Wan. 2018. A Neural Approach to Pun Generation. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 1650–1660, Melbourne, Australia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Neural Approach to Pun Generation (Yu et al., ACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P18-1153.pdf
Poster:
 P18-1153.Poster.pdf