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