That's What She Said: Double Entendre Identification

Humor identification is a hard natural language understanding problem. We identify a subproblem — the “that’s what she said” problem — with two distinguishing characteristics: (1) use of nouns that are euphemisms for sexually explicit nouns and (2) structure common in the erotic domain. We address this problem in a classification approach that includes features that model those two characteristics. Experiments on web data demonstrate that our approach improves precision by 12% over baseline techniques that use only word-based features.