Oxymora and Punchlines: Two Ways of Using Incongruity to Generate Attractive Sentences

Hiroaki Yamanes

Keio University and Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

Tuesday, November 18, 2014
12:30 p.m., Conference Room 5A

Word sensibilities have been studied for a long time in the psycholinguistic field, and it is expected that the advancement of natural language processing (NLP) will be very useful in producing applications of this knowledge. Some sentences attract people’s attention even when they consist of short sequences of words only. In this talk, we indicate two methods of drawing people’s attention to sentences, both making use of incongruity. The first approach is the employment of an oxymoron; it is often seen in slogans. Oxymora are combinations of contradictory or incongruous words, typically used to draw readers’ attention to a text or some part of it. To produce them, a method of obtaining antonyms and evaluating the candidate oxymora are considered. The second approach is to employ a punchline framework to produce incongruity and yield a humorous proverb or saying. By changing the end of such a proverb, diverging from the expectations of the hearer, the proposed system aims to produce an amusing sentence.

Bio:

Hiroaki Yamane is a post-doctoral fellow in Open and Environmental Systems at Keio University and a Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He completed his PhD at Keio University under the supervision of Prof. Masafumi Hagiwara. His research interests include: sentiment analysis, sentence generation, and sentence preference estimation. He is more broadly interested in multidisciplinary areas natural language, cognitive science, and neuroscience.