mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

AmbiPun: Generating Humorous Puns with Ambiguous Context

arXiv 2205.01825 ↗First posted 4 May 2022cs.CL cs.AI cs.LGcited by 21

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Abstract (arXiv)

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.

Key facts. Cited by 21 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 17 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 May 2022.

Builds on

17 of 41 references.

References · 17

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,399
  2. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,419
  3. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,599
  4. 2015A Diversity-Promoting Objective Function for Neural Conversation Modelscited by 1,077
  5. 2013One Billion Word Benchmark for Measuring Progress in Statistical Language Modelingcited by 308
  6. 2018A Retrieve-and-Edit Framework for Predicting Structured Outputscited by 73
  7. 2021MERMAID: Metaphor Generation with Symbolism and Discriminative Decodingcited by 49
  8. 2019Pun Generation with Surprisecited by 37
  9. 2020R3: Reverse, Retrieve, and Rank for Sarcasm Generation with Commonsense Knowledgecited by 32
  10. 2021Metaphor Generation with Conceptual Mappingscited by 32
  11. 2020TextBrewer: An Open-Source Knowledge Distillation Toolkit for Natural Language Processingcited by 26
  12. 2021HypoGen: Hyperbole Generation with Commonsense and Counterfactual Knowledgecited by 22
5 more
  1. 2019Pun-GAN: Generative Adversarial Network for Pun Generationcited by 18
  2. 2019Multi-channel Reverse Dictionary Modelcited by 16
  3. 2015Backward and Forward Language Modeling for Constrained Sentence Generationcited by 9
  4. 2019Joint Detection and Location of English Punscited by 9
  5. 2020"Judge me by my size (noun), do you?'' YodaLib: A Demographic-Aware Humor Generation Frameworkcited by 8

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 9; 2023: 4; 2024: 2; 2025: 4; 2026: 2.

21 papers.

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  1. 2022Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Themcited by 1,807
  2. 2023The Curious Decline of Linguistic Diversity: Training Language Models on Synthetic Textcited by 100
  3. 2022Evaluating Human-Language Model Interactioncited by 92
  4. 2023MacGyver: Are Large Language Models Creative Problem Solvers?cited by 34
  5. 2022ExPUNations: Augmenting Puns with Keywords and Explanationscited by 21
  6. 2024"A good pun is its own reword": Can Large Language Models Understand Puns?cited by 21
  7. 2022Inducing Character-level Structure in Subword-based Language Models with Type-level Interchange Intervention Trainingcited by 16
  8. 2022Crowd Score: A Method for the Evaluation of Jokes using Large Language Model AI Voters as Judgescited by 12
  9. 2023The Iron(ic) Melting Pot: Reviewing Human Evaluation in Humour, Irony and Sarcasm Generationcited by 11
  10. 2022A Unified Framework for Pun Generation with Humor Principlescited by 10
  11. 2022Systematicity in GPT-3's Interpretation of Novel English Noun Compoundscited by 9
  12. 2024Creativity in AI: Progresses and Challengescited by 7
9 more
  1. 2022Controllable Text Generation for Open-Domain Creativity and Fairnesscited by 6
  2. 2025Comparing Apples to Oranges: A Dataset & Analysis of LLM Humour Understanding from Traditional Puns to Topical Jokescited by 6
  3. 2022Context-Situated Pun Generationcited by 5
  4. 2023Creative Data Generation: A Review Focusing on Text and Poetrycited by 5
  5. 2025Who's Laughing Now? An Overview of Computational Humour Generation and Explanationcited by 5
  6. 2025Pun Unintended: LLMs and the Illusion of Humor Understandingcited by 3
  7. 2025AssoCiAm: A Benchmark for Evaluating Association Thinking while Circumventing Ambiguitycited by 0
  8. 2026Towards High-Level Semantic Intelligencecited by 0
  9. 2026Pun Intended: Multi-Agent Translation of Wordplay with Contrastive Learning and Phonetic-Semantic Embeddingscited by 0