Identifying Humor in Reviews using Background Text Sources

Alex Morales, Chengxiang Zhai

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

We study the problem of automatically identifying humorous text from a new kind of text data, i.e., online reviews. We propose a generative language model, based on the theory of incongruity, to model humorous text, which allows us to leverage background text sources, such as Wikipedia entry descriptions, and enables construction of multiple features for identifying humorous reviews. Evaluation of these features using supervised learning for classifying reviews into humorous and non-humorous reviews shows that the features constructed based on the proposed generative model are much more effective than the major features proposed in the existing literature, allowing us to achieve almost 86% accuracy. These humorous review predictions can also supply good indicators for identifying helpful reviews.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationEMNLP 2017 - Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages492-501
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781945626838
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 1 2017
Event2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2017 - Copenhagen, Denmark
Duration: Sep 9 2017Sep 11 2017

Publication series

NameEMNLP 2017 - Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings

Conference

Conference2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2017
Country/TerritoryDenmark
CityCopenhagen
Period9/9/179/11/17

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Information Systems
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics

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