# HypoGen: Hyperbole Generation with Commonsense and Counterfactual Knowledge

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.05097 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05097/

## Key facts

- Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Sep 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [Universal Adversarial Triggers for Attacking and Analyzing NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07125/) (2019)
- [The Woman Worked as a Babysitter: On Biases in Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01326/) (2019)
- [COMET: Commonsense Transformers for Automatic Knowledge Graph Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05317/) (2019)
- [Improving Grammatical Error Correction via Pre-Training a Copy-Augmented Architecture with Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00138/) (2019)
- [MERMAID: Metaphor Generation with Symbolism and Discriminative Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06779/) (2021)
- [Pun Generation with Surprise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06828/) (2019)
- [R3: Reverse, Retrieve, and Rank for Sarcasm Generation with Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13248/) (2020)
- [Metaphor Generation with Conceptual Mappings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01228/) (2021)
- [Pun-GAN: Generative Adversarial Network for Pun Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10950/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Are Personalized Stochastic Parrots More Dangerous? Evaluating Persona Biases in Dialogue Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05280/) (2023)
- [AmbiPun: Generating Humorous Puns with Ambiguous Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01825/) (2022)
- [VLC-BERT: Visual Question Answering with Contextualized Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13626/) (2022)
- [MOVER: Mask, Over-generate and Rank for Hyperbole Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07726/) (2021)
- [Failure Modes of LLMs for Causal Reasoning on Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23884/) (2024)
- [ParaAMR: A Large-Scale Syntactically Diverse Paraphrase Dataset by AMR Back-Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16585/) (2023)
- [A Match Made in Heaven: A Multi-task Framework for Hyperbole and Metaphor Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17480/) (2023)
- [Creativity in AI: Progresses and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17218/) (2024)
- [PANCETTA: Phoneme Aware Neural Completion to Elicit Tongue Twisters Automatically](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06275/) (2022)
- [Creative Data Generation: A Review Focusing on Text and Poetry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08493/) (2023)
- [Enhancing Hyperbole and Metaphor Detection with Their Bidirectional Dynamic Interaction and Emotion Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15504/) (2025)
- [Who's Laughing Now? An Overview of Computational Humour Generation and Explanation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21175/) (2025)
- [Unsupervised Syntactically Controlled Paraphrase Generation with Abstract Meaning Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00881/) (2022)
- [PIP: Parse-Instructed Prefix for Syntactically Controlled Paraphrase Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16701/) (2023)
- [Multilingual Multi-Figurative Language Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00121/) (2023)
- [A Multidimensional Framework for Evaluating Lexical Semantic Change with Social Science Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06052/) (2024)
- [Multi-Figurative Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01835/) (2022)
- [REFFLY: Melody-Constrained Lyrics Editing Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00292/) (2024)
- [Implicit and Explicit Commonsense for Multi-sentence Video Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07545/) (2023)
- [MetFuse: Figurative Fusion between Metonymy and Metaphor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.12919/) (2026)
- [Figuratively Speaking: Authorship Attribution via Multi-Task Figurative Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08218/) (2024)
- [Computational Approaches to the Detection of Lesser-Known Rhetorical Figures: A Systematic Survey and Research Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16674/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A hyperbole is an intentional and creative exaggeration not to be taken literally. Despite its ubiquity in daily life, the computational explorations of hyperboles are scarce. In this paper, we tackle the under-explored and challenging task: sentence-level hyperbole generation. We start with a representative syntactic pattern for intensification and systematically study the semantic (commonsense and counterfactual) relationships between each component in such hyperboles. Next, we leverage the COMeT and reverse COMeT models to do commonsense and counterfactual inference. We then generate multiple hyperbole candidates based on our findings from the pattern, and train neural classifiers to rank and select high-quality hyperboles. Automatic and human evaluations show that our generation method is able to generate hyperboles creatively with high success rate and intensity scores.