Papers › AmbiPun: Generating Humorous Puns with Ambiguous Context

AmbiPun: Generating Humorous Puns with Ambiguous Context

4 May 2022NAACL 2022 7arXiv:2205.01825archive 2025-07-28

Anirudh Mittal, Yufei Tian, Nanyun Peng

In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective way to generate pun sentences that does not require any training on existing puns. Our approach is inspired by humor theories that ambiguity comes from the context rather than the pun word itself. Given a pair of definitions of a pun word, our model first produces a list of related concepts through a reverse dictionary. We then utilize one-shot GPT3 to generate context words and then generate puns incorporating context words from both concepts. Human evaluation shows that our method successfully generates pun 52% of the time, outperforming well-crafted baselines and the state-of-the-art models by a large margin.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

pluslabnlp/ambipun officialmentioned in paper report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Reverse Dictionary

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections