Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
Book cover

EPIA Conference on Artificial Intelligence

EPIA 2019: Progress in Artificial Intelligence pp 744–756Cite as

Recognizing Humor in Portuguese: First Steps

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11805))

Abstract

Within the domain of Artificial Intelligence, humor has been a research topic for some time, but the automatic recognition of its verbal expression has never been tackled for Portuguese. This work aims to change this scenario. We describe a set of experiments towards the development of computational models that recognize humor written in Portuguese, based on content and humor-specific features extracted. Interesting results, with F1-scores up to 0.93, are achieved when classifiers for this purpose are trained and tested on texts with a similar style (question-answers or news headlines). Yet, when the testing examples are of a different style, results are poor, which suggests that much more has to be done towards effective humor recognition.

This work was partially funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology’s (FCT) INCoDe 2030 initiative, in the scope of the demonstration project AIA, “Apoio Inteligente a empreendedores (chatbots)”; and by the SOCIALITE Project (PTDC/EEISCR/2072/2014), co-financed by COMPETE 2020, Portugal 2020 – Operational Program for Competitiveness and Internationalization (POCI), European Union’s ERDF (European Regional Development Fund), and FCT.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://ltpf.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/omaiscompleto-anedotc3a3c2a1ri.pdf.

  2. 2.

    https://www.facebook.com/CadernoDasPiadas/.

  3. 3.

    http://natura.di.uminho.pt/~jj/pln/calao/calao.dic.txt.

  4. 4.

    https://scikit-learn.org/.

  5. 5.

    A 10-fold cross validation in any dataset takes only a few seconds in a regular laptop.

References

  1. Attardo, S. (ed.): Encyclopedia of Humor Studies. SAGE (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Barbieri, F., Saggion, H.: Automatic detection of irony and humour in Twitter. In: Proceedings of 5th International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC), pp. 155–162 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Binsted, K., et al.: Computational humor. IEEE Intell. Syst. 21(2), 59–69 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Carvalho, P., Sarmento, L., Silva, M.J., De Oliveira, E.: Clues for detecting irony in user-generated contents: oh...!! it’s so easy;-). In: Proceedings of 1st International CIKM Workshop on Topic-Sentiment Analysis for Mass Opinion, pp. 53–56. ACM (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Ferreira, J., Gonçalo Oliveira, H., Rodrigues, R.: Improving NLTK for processing Portuguese. In: Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2019) (2019, in press)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Freitas, C., Carvalho, P., Gonçalo Oliveira, H., Mota, C., Santos, D.: Second HAREM: advancing the state of the art of named entity recognition in Portuguese. In: Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2010, ELRA, La Valleta, Malta, May 2010

    Google Scholar 

  7. de Freitas, L.A., Vanin, A.A., Hogetop, D.N., Bochernitsan, M.N., Vieira, R.: Pathways for irony detection in tweets. In: Proceedings of 29th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, pp. 628–633. ACM (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Gonçalo Oliveira, H.: A survey on Portuguese lexical knowledge bases: contents, comparison and combination. Information 9(2), 32 (2018)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Gonçalo Oliveira, H., Rodrigues, R.: Explorando a geração automática de adivinhas em português. Linguamática 10(1), 3–18 (2018)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Hartmann, N., Fonseca, E., Shulby, C., Treviso, M., Rodrigues, J., Aluísio, S.: Portuguese word embeddings: evaluating on word analogies and natural language tasks. In: Proceedings of 11th Brazilian Symposium in Information and Human Language Technology, STIL (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Liu, L., Zhang, D., Song, W.: Exploiting syntactic structures for humor recognition. In: Proceedings of 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, pp. 1875–1883. Association for Computational Linguistics, August 2018

    Google Scholar 

  12. Magnini, B., et al.: Overview of the CLEF 2004 multilingual question answering track. In: Peters, C., Clough, P., Gonzalo, J., Jones, G.J.F., Kluck, M., Magnini, B. (eds.) CLEF 2004. LNCS, vol. 3491, pp. 371–391. Springer, Heidelberg (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/11519645_38

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  13. Mihalcea, R., Pulman, S.: Characterizing humour: an exploration of features in humorous texts. In: Gelbukh, A. (ed.) CICLing 2007. LNCS, vol. 4394, pp. 337–347. Springer, Heidelberg (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70939-8_30

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  14. Mihalcea, R., Strapparava, C.: Learning to laugh (automatically): computational models for humor recognition. Comput. Intell. 22(2), 126–142 (2006)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  15. Paiva, V., Rademaker, A., Melo, G.: OpenWordNet-PT: an open Brazilian WordNet for reasoning. In: Proceedings of 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. COLING (Demo Paper) (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Rassi, A.P., Baptista, J., Vale, O.: Automatic detection of proverbs and their variants. In: Proceedings 3rd Symposium on Languages. Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2014), Bragança, Portugal, pp. 235–249. OASICS, Schloss Dagstuhl (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Silva, M.J., Carvalho, P., Sarmento, L.: Building a sentiment Lexicon for social judgement mining. In: Caseli, H., Villavicencio, A., Teixeira, A., Perdigão, F. (eds.) PROPOR 2012. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 7243, pp. 218–228. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28885-2_25

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  18. Sjöbergh, J., Araki, K.: Recognizing humor without recognizing meaning. In: Masulli, F., Mitra, S., Pasi, G. (eds.) WILF 2007. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4578, pp. 469–476. Springer, Heidelberg (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73400-0_59

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  19. Soares, A.P., Costa, A.S., Machado, J., Comesaña, M., Oliveira, H.M.: The Minho Word Pool: norms for imageability, concreteness, and subjective frequency for 3,800 Portuguese words. Behav. Res. Methods 49(3), 1065–1081 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Tagnin, S.E.: O humor como quebra da convencionalidade. Revista brasileira de linguística aplicada 5(1), 247–257 (2005)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Yang, D., Lavie, A., Dyer, C., Hovy, E.: Humor recognition and humor anchor extraction. In: Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pp. 2367–2376. ACL Press (2015)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center of Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    André Clemêncio, Ana Alves & Hugo Gonçalo Oliveira

  2. Department of Informatics Engineering, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    André Clemêncio & Hugo Gonçalo Oliveira

  3. ISEC, Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal

    Ana Alves

Authors
  1. André Clemêncio
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Ana Alves
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Hugo Gonçalo Oliveira
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hugo Gonçalo Oliveira .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. INESC-TEC, University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro, Vila Real, Portugal

    Paulo Moura Oliveira

  2. University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    Paulo Novais

  3. LIACC/UP, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Luís Paulo Reis

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Clemêncio, A., Alves, A., Gonçalo Oliveira, H. (2019). Recognizing Humor in Portuguese: First Steps. In: Moura Oliveira, P., Novais, P., Reis, L. (eds) Progress in Artificial Intelligence. EPIA 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11805. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30244-3_61

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30244-3_61

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-30243-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-30244-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation