Papers › Punny Captions: Witty Wordplay in Image Descriptions
Punny Captions: Witty Wordplay in Image Descriptions
Arjun Chandrasekaran, Devi Parikh, Mohit Bansal
Wit is a form of rich interaction that is often grounded in a specific situation (e.g., a comment in response to an event). In this work, we attempt to build computational models that can produce witty descriptions for a given image. Inspired by a cognitive account of humor appreciation, we employ linguistic wordplay, specifically puns, in image descriptions. We develop two approaches which involve retrieving witty descriptions for a given image from a large corpus of sentences, or generating them via an encoder-decoder neural network architecture. We compare our approach against meaningful baseline approaches via human studies and show substantial improvements. We find that when a human is subject to similar constraints as the model regarding word usage and style, people vote the image descriptions generated by our model to be slightly wittier than human-written witty descriptions. Unsurprisingly, humans are almost always wittier than the model when they are free to choose the vocabulary, style, etc.
In Syntology View this paper on Syntology: its repositories, every harvested function with whether it ran, its licence and the call to fetch it.
Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
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
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