Unified Humor Detection Based on Sentence-pair Augmentation and Transfer Learning

摘要

We propose a unified multilingual model for humor detection which can be trained under a transfer learning framework. 1) The model is built based on pre-trained multilingual BERT, thereby is able to make predictions on Chinese, Russian and Spanish corpora. 2) We step out from single sentence classification and propose sequence-pair prediction which considers the inter-sentence relationship. 3) We propose the Sentence Discrepancy Prediction (SDP) loss, aiming to measure the semantic discrepancy of the sequence-pair, which often appears in the setup and punchline of a joke. Our method achieves two SoTA and a second-place on three humor detection corpora in three languages (Russian, Spanish and Chinese), and also improves F1-score by 4%-6%, which demonstrates its effectiveness in multilingual humor detection tasks.