Puntuguese: A Corpus of Puns in Portuguese with Micro-edits

Marcio Lima Inácio, Gabriela Wick-Pedro, Renata Ramisch, Luís Espírito Santo, Xiomara S. Q. Chacón, Roney L. S. Santos, Rogério F. de Sousa, Rafael T. Anchiêta, Hugo Gonçalo Oliveira

Abstract: Humor is an intricate part of verbal communication and dealing with this kind of phenomenon is essential to building systems that can process language at large with all of its complexities. In this paper, we introduce Puntuguese, a new corpus of punning humor in Portuguese, motivated by previous works showing that currently available corpora for this language are still unfit for Machine Learning due to data leakage. Puntuguese comprises 4,903 manually-gathered punning one-liners in Brazilian and European Portuguese. To create negative examples that differ exclusively in terms of funniness, we carried out a micro-editing process, in which all jokes were edited by fluent Portuguese speakers to make the texts unfunny. Finally, we did some experiments on Humor Recognition, showing that Puntuguese is considerably more difficult than the previous corpus, achieving an F1-Score of 68.9%. With this new dataset, we hope to enable research not only in NLP but also in other fields that are interested in studying humor; thus, the data is publicly available.