Getting Serious about Humor: Crafting Humor Datasets with Unfunny Large Language Models
Zachary Horvitz, Jingru Chen, Rahul Aditya, Harshvardhan Srivastava, Robert West, Zhou Yu, Kathleen McKeown
Abstract
Humor is a fundamental facet of human cognition and interaction. Yet, despite recent advances in natural language processing, humor detection remains a challenging task that is complicated by the scarcity of datasets that pair humorous texts with similar non-humorous counterparts. We investigate whether large language models (LLMs) can generate synthetic data for humor detection via editing texts. We benchmark LLMs on an existing human dataset and show that current LLMs display an impressive ability to “unfun” jokes, as judged by humans and as measured on the downstream task of humor detection. We extend our approach to a code-mixed English-Hindi humor dataset where we find that GPT-4’s synthetic data is highly rated by bilingual annotators and provides challenging adversarial examples for humor classifiers.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{horvitz-etal-2024-getting,
title = "Getting Serious about Humor: Crafting Humor Datasets with Unfunny Large Language Models",
author = "Horvitz, Zachary and
Chen, Jingru and
Aditya, Rahul and
Srivastava, Harshvardhan and
West, Robert and
Yu, Zhou and
McKeown, Kathleen",
editor = "Ku, Lun-Wei and
Martins, Andre and
Srikumar, Vivek",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
month = aug,
year = "2024",
address = "Bangkok, Thailand",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-short.76/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.acl-short.76",
pages = "855--869"
}