"Let Everything Turn Well in Your Wife" : Generation of Adult Humor Using Lexical Constraints

Peer reviewe

Linguistic Expressions of Pidgin in Nigerian Stand-up Comedy

This dissertation is a study of the comics’ lexical choices and how they achieve their goals with words. The comics’ choice of words is far from being incidental, superficial, or supplementary. Performers’ choices of words show how their ideas are embodied in language. That is to say, the effect of how a comedian uses words and humor strategies is vital for understanding the contextual meaning of jokes and how they appeal to logic and reason. The objectives are to identify and categorize lexical choices and interpret their denotative, connotative, and affective meanings. Based on the Incongruity Theory (Attardo, 1994) Data were obtained from videos on YouTube channels of two comedy shows, “AY Live” and “Night of a Thousand Laughs.” These comedy shows are the most widely viewed in the country and are held every year on national holidays in different cities in Nigeria and abroad. Five hours 23 minutes, and nine seconds of video were examined from 2017 to 2020 with 20 stand-up comedians performing in front of a live audience. The data from these shows will be listened to, transcribed using conversation analysis formalisms, translated to English (because NSCs use NPE for their performances), and subjected to the qualitative research method of analysis using Reis’ (2018) Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Analysis (PSA). The findings reveal the pattern NSCs used to form their jokes and that they used words in the basilectal register in the punchlines to create a surprise in the situations of static incongruity and the sequence of events for dynamic incongruity jokes. The results from this dissertation on NSCs\u27 word choice pointed to pedagogical implications for the instruction of stand-up comedy to help learners become professionals in the craft of stand-up comedy and entertainment to become more effective communicators and entertainers

Overview of the CLEF 2022 JOKER Task 3: Pun Translation from English into French

The translation of the pun is one of the most challenging issues for translators and for this reason has become an intensively studied phenomenon in the field of translation studies. Translation technology aims to partially or even totally automate the translation process, but relatively little attention has been paid to the use of computers for the translation of wordplay. The CLEF 2022 JOKER track aims to build a multilingual corpus of wordplay and evaluation metrics in order to advance the automation of creative-language translation. This paper provides an overview of the track’s Pilot Task 3, where the goal is to translate entire phrases containing wordplay (particularly puns). We describe the data collection, the task setup, the evaluation procedure, and the participants’ results. We also cover a side product of our project, a homogeneous monolingual corpus for wordplay detection in French

BU-Pier Team @ CLEF JOKER 2023 Open Task: Slip of the Tongue Generation to Improve Social Interaction with Virtual Agents

We build on the work by [1] which tackled the problem of generating puns in French, by experimenting to generate puns based on the data released for the CLEF 2022 JOKER and inspired by methods for generating English puns with large pre-trained models. We propose, an adaptation of the previous French generation sequence back in English, using an IMSdb modified dataset from [2]

“Funny How?” A Serious Look at Humor in Conversational Agents

Conversational agents are rapidly advancing in terms of their capabilities and human likeness - both of which are intended to enhance the user experience and engagement. One human quality that can potentially increase trust and likeability is humor. However, what is considered humorous and what is not depends on many contextual and personal factors that are not only difficult for machines to detect, but even humans are still struggling to understand them. This makes training AI to be humorous highly challenging. But is this due only to the technical limitations? In this provocation paper, we discuss the hindrances to utilizing humor in commercial conversational agents and propose addressing this topic from a social and political perspective

Rebel with a Cause: Domnica Radulescu’s Theater Translated into Spanish

This paper focuses on Domnica Radulescu’s creative solutions when deconstructing myths, stereotypes, and prejudices and on the translator’s responses. In Domnica Radulescu’s plays, Exile is My Home and The Virgins of Seville (compiled, in their Spanish versions, in Dos Obras Dramáticas/Two Plays), the translator’s knowledge of both the author’s background and the target readership’s duality (Spanish host society and Romanian migrants) plays an important role in her decisions. Acknowledging that theater as a genre directly exposes hybridity of the author, translator, actors, and audience, this paper discusses the cultural context underpinning the original texts and translational options. At the same time, the reception of the translation into Spanish is partially confirmed through a small survey of Romanian diaspora and Spanish readers