# KoWit-24: A Richly Annotated Dataset of Wordplay in News Headlines

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01510 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01510/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [HateXplain: A Benchmark Dataset for Explainable Hate Speech Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10289/) (2020)
- [iSarcasm: A Dataset of Intended Sarcasm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.03123/) (2019)
- ["President Vows to Cut <Taxes> Hair": Dataset and Analysis of Creative Text Editing for Humorous Headlines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.00274/) (2019)
- [ExPUNations: Augmenting Puns with Keywords and Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13513/) (2022)
- ["A good pun is its own reword": Can Large Language Models Understand Puns?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.13599/) (2024)
- [Self-Attentive Model for Headline Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07786/) (2019)
- [Reverse-Engineering Satire, or "Paper on Computational Humor Accepted Despite Making Serious Advances"](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.03253/) (2019)
- [SemEval-2020 Task 7: Assessing Humor in Edited News Headlines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00304/) (2020)
- [Stimulating Creativity with FunLines: A Case Study of Humor Generation in Headlines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02031/) (2020)
- [Let's be Humorous: Knowledge Enhanced Humor Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13317/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present KoWit-24, a dataset with fine-grained annotation of wordplay in 2,700 Russian news headlines. KoWit-24 annotations include the presence of wordplay, its type, wordplay anchors, and words/phrases the wordplay refers to. Unlike the majority of existing humor collections of canned jokes, KoWit-24 provides wordplay contexts -- each headline is accompanied by the news lead and summary. The most common type of wordplay in the dataset is the transformation of collocations, idioms, and named entities -- the mechanism that has been underrepresented in previous humor datasets. Our experiments with five LLMs show that there is ample room for improvement in wordplay detection and interpretation tasks. The dataset and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/Humor-Research/KoWit-24