Translating wordplay across languages has long challenged both professional translators and machine translation systems. We investigate three approaches to translating puns from English to French by combining large language models with linguistic constraints for wordplay generation.
arXiv:2607. 13189v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present RAGthoven, our system for SemEval-2026 Task 1 (MWAHAHA), Subtask A (multilingual constrained humor generation in English, Spanish, and Chinese).
By Marek \v{S}uppa, Vikt\'oria Ondrejov\'a, Lucia Ganajov\'a, Gregor Karetka, Daniel Skala
Internet memes are a pervasive form of multimodal online communication; however, such communication often involves users from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Therefore, adapting memes acr...
TransMeme introduces a multi‑agent framework for cross‑cultural meme transcreation, addressing the unique challenges of preserving intent, adapting cultural meaning, and maintaining multimodal consistency. The system coordinates specialized agents for cultural adaptation, text rewriting, revision, and visual adjustment, and is evaluated on Chinese‑English meme pairs. Human and LLM‑based evaluations show that TransMeme outperforms baselines, achieving a 33.1% average improvement in human scores and a 60% Top‑1 ranking rate in LLM judgments.
By Jingyi Zheng, Yule Liu, Zifan Peng, Tianyi Hu, Yuemeng Zhao, Xinhu Zheng, Xinlei He
arXiv:2606. 00022v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humor generation remains difficult not only because producing fluent, novel jokes is hard, but because "funny" is audience-dependent and supervision is noisy -- preferences vary with audience, context, and culture, and annotator agreement is often low.
By Alexey Tikhonov, Alexey Ivanov
PunGraph is a retrieval‑enhanced knowledge‑graph framework designed to improve pun understanding by combining phonetic and semantic information. It builds a phonetic‑semantic lexical graph using the Unisyn phonetic dictionary, IPA and G2P representations, and WordNet definitions, and uses this graph to retrieve candidate words or senses that constrain large language model reasoning. The authors also introduce WebPun, a new dataset of 5,730 annotated heterographic and homographic puns, and demonstrate that PunGraph consistently boosts the performance of small‑scale LLMs on SemEval‑2017 and WebPun, achieving results competitive with strong proprietary models.
By Yuchen Su, Zijian Huang, Yaotian Shi, Shaoxin Zhong, Ruofan Wang, Mengze Li, Yonghua Zhu, Diana Benavides-Prado, Michael Witbrock
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.
By Fabio De Ponte
arXiv:2607. 19011v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal humor in memes, cartoons, and comics remains difficult for AI systems because intended meaning depends on non-literal mechanisms, shared cultural knowledge, and communicative intent rather than literal scene description.
By Tuo Liang, Zhe Hu, Disheng Liu, Jing Li, Yu Yin
arXiv:2604.09629v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Humor generation poses a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), because their standard training objective (next-token prediction)...
By Edward Ajayi, Prasenjit Mitra
arXiv:2509. 07829v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Literary translation has recently gained attention as a distinct and complex task in machine translation research, yet translation by small open models remains an open problem, particularly for low-resource languages such as Romanian.
By Mihai Nadas, Laura Diosan, Andreea Tomescu, Andrei Piscoran
arXiv:2604. 18347v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision Language Models (VLMs) achieved rapid progress in the recent years.
By Daniela Baiamonte, Elena Fano, Matteo Gabburo, Stefano Simonazzi, Leonardo Rigutini, Andrea Zugarini
arXiv:2609.23490v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly execute multi-step workflows through tool use and interaction with users and environments. However, curr...
By Peng Kuang, Yuchun Fan, Jiangnan Li, Minghao Wu, Jialong Tang, Hao-Ran Wei, Weixuan Wang, Jianhong Tu, Baosong Yang, Tong Xiao