Duluth at SemEval-2020 Task 7: Using Surprise as a Key to Unlock Humorous Headlines

Shuning Jin, Yue Yin, XianE Tang, Ted Pedersen

Abstract: We use pretrained transformer-based language models in SemEval-2020 Task 7: Assessing the Funniness of Edited News Headlines. Inspired by the incongruity theory of humor, we use a contrastive approach to capture the surprise in the edited headlines. In the official evaluation, our system gets 0.531 RMSE in Subtask 1, 11th among 49 submissions. In Subtask 2, our system gets 0.632 accuracy, 9th among 32 submissions.