In plain words: A writer network turns one word's two meanings into a pun sentence, and a judge scores how well it fits sentences with those meanings; that score rewards the writer, so no pun examples are needed. Its puns were more ambiguous and diverse than rival systems tested.
Abstract
In this paper, we focus on the task of generating a pun sentence given a pair of word senses. A major challenge for pun generation is the lack of large-scale pun corpus to guide the supervised learning. To remedy this, we propose an adversarial generative network for pun generation (Pun-GAN), which does not require any pun corpus. It consists of a generator to produce pun sentences, and a discriminator to distinguish between the generated pun sentences and the real sentences with specific word senses. The output of the discriminator is then used as a reward to train the generator via reinforcement learning, encouraging it to produce pun sentences that can support two word senses simultaneously. Experiments show that the proposed Pun-GAN can generate sentences that are more ambiguous and diverse in both automatic and human evaluation.
Fuli Luo, Shunyao Li, Pengcheng Yang, Lei li, Baobao Chang, Zhifang Sui, Xu Sun
arXiv:1910.10950 · cs.CL · submitted Oct 24, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · EMNLP 2019 (short paper)