Applying a Pre-trained Language Model to Spanish Twitter Humor Prediction

Our entry into the HAHA 2019 Challenge placed $3^{rd}$ in the classification task and $2^{nd}$ in the regression task. We describe our system and innovations, as well as comparing our results to a Naive Bayes baseline. A large Twitter based corpus allowed us to train a language model from scratch focused on Spanish and transfer that knowledge to our competition model. To overcome the inherent errors in some labels we reduce our class confidence with label smoothing in the loss function. All the code for our project is included in a GitHub repository for easy reference and to enable replication by others.Comment: IberLEF 2019 Worksho

LRG at SemEval-2020 Task 7: Assessing the Ability of BERT and Derivative Models to Perform Short-Edits based Humor Grading

In this paper, we assess the ability of BERT and its derivative models (RoBERTa, DistilBERT, and ALBERT) for short-edits based humor grading. We test these models for humor grading and classification tasks on the Humicroedit and the FunLines dataset. We perform extensive experiments with these models to test their language modeling and generalization abilities via zero-shot inference and cross-dataset inference based approaches. Further, we also inspect the role of self-attention layers in humor-grading by performing a qualitative analysis over the self-attention weights from the final layer of the trained BERT model. Our experiments show that all the pre-trained BERT derivative models show significant generalization capabilities for humor-grading related tasks.Comment: Submitted at SemEval-2020 worksho