Detecting Intentional Lexical Ambiguity in English Puns

The article describes a model of automatic analysis of puns, where a word is intentionally used in two meanings at the same time (the target word). We employ Roget’s Thesaurus to discover two groups of words, which, in a pun, form around two abstract bits of meaning (semes). They become a semantic vector, based on which an SVM classifier learns to recognize puns, reaching a score 0.73 for F-measure. We apply several rule-based methods to locate intentionally ambiguous (target) words, based on structural and semantic criteria. It appears that the structural criterion is more effective, although it possibly characterizes only the tested dataset. The results we get correlate with the results of other teams at SemEval-2017 competition (Task 7 Detection and Interpretation of English Puns), considering effects of using supervised learning models and word statistics.