Jokes Aside: Measuring the Semantic Distance of Double Meanings

The paper investigates how semantic distance and ambiguity contribute to joke humor by revisiting and extending metrics from prior work. It introduces a new symmetry metric—measuring how close the ambiguous element Z is to both X and Y—and evaluates it using two embedding models on three joke datasets, including expanded versions with paired ambiguous sentences. Although models based on these metrics performed poorly in predicting humor ratings, the symmetry metric consistently correlated with higher-rated jokes, hinting it captures a key, though not sole, property of humor.