UWaterloo at SemEval-2017 Task 7: Locating the Pun Using Syntactic Characteristics and Corpus-based Metrics

Abstract

The paper presents a system for locating a pun word. The developed method calculates a score for each word in a pun, using a number of components, including its Inverse Document Frequency (IDF), Normalized Pointwise Mutual Information (NPMI) with other words in the pun text, its position in the text, part-of-speech and some syntactic features. The method achieved the best performance in the Heterographic category and the second best in the Homographic. Further analysis showed that IDF is the most useful characteristic, whereas the count of words with which the given word has high NPMI has a negative effect on performance.