arXiv AI

Who Laughs with Whom? Disentangling Influential Factors in Humor Preferences across User Clusters and LLMs

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 24

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.

By Fabio De Ponte
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

MultiHuSE: A Multimodal Dataset for Humour Styles and Emotions

MultiHuSE is a multimodal dataset featuring 2,407 high‑definition videos of 50 diverse actors delivering 1,463 text samples in four psychological humour styles—affiliative, aggressive, self‑enhancing, and self‑deprecating—plus neutral content. Each text is performed by multiple actors, allowing analysis of expressive diversity, and a subset includes emotion annotations. Baseline experiments show that multimodal fusion improves humour style classification accuracy over unimodal approaches, especially for affiliative humour.

By Mary Ogbuka Kenneth, Foaad Khosmood, Abbas Edalat
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Timing is Everything: Temporal Scaffolding of Semantic Surprise in Humor

The paper introduces the Dual Prediction Violation (DPV) framework to study how timing and semantic surprise interact in humor. Analyzing 828 Chinese stand‑up performances, it finds that temporal features—especially pauses before high‑surprise punchlines—are more predictive of audience appreciation than overall semantic incongruity. The study reframes humor as a temporally scaffolded phenomenon where timing and content coordinate strategically rather than independently.

By Yuxi Ma, Yongqian Peng, Junchen Lyu, Chi Zhang, Yixin Zhu