Recognizing Humor in Portuguese: First Steps

Abstract

Within the domain of Artificial Intelligence, humor has been a research topic for some time, but the automatic recognition of its verbal expression has never been tackled for Portuguese. This work aims to change this scenario. We describe a set of experiments towards the development of computational models that recognize humor written in Portuguese, based on content and humor-specific features extracted. Interesting results, with F1-scores up to 0.93, are achieved when classifiers for this purpose are trained and tested on texts with a similar style (question-answers or news headlines). Yet, when the testing examples are of a different style, results are poor, which suggests that much more has to be done towards effective humor recognition.