OFAI-UKP at HAHA@IberLEF2019: Predicting the Humorousness of Tweets Using Gaussian Process Preference Learning

Most humour processing systems to date make at best discrete, coarse-grained distinctions between the comical and the conventional, yet such notions are better conceptualized as a broad spectrum. In this paper, we present a probabilistic approach, a variant of Gaussian process preference learning (GPPL), that learns to rank and rate the humorousness of short texts by exploiting human preference judgments and automatically sourced linguistic annotations. We apply our system, which had previously shown good performance on English-language one-liners annotated with pairwise humorousness annotations, to the Spanish-language data set of the HAHA@IberLEF2019 evaluation campaign. We report system performance for the campaign's two subtasks, humour detection and funniness score prediction, and discuss some issues arising from the conversion between the numeric scores used in the HAHA@IberLEF2019 data and the pairwise judgment annotations required for our method.

Cross-topic Argument Mining from Heterogeneous Sources Using Attention-based Neural Networks

Argument mining is a core technology for automating argument search in large document collections. Despite its usefulness for this task, most current approaches to argument mining are designed for use only with specific text types and fall short when applied to heterogeneous texts. In this paper, we propose a new sentential annotation scheme that is reliably applicable by crowd workers to arbitrary Web texts. We source annotations for over 25,000 instances covering eight controversial topics. The results of cross-topic experiments show that our attention-based neural network generalizes best to unseen topics and outperforms vanilla BiLSTM models by 6% in accuracy and 11% in F-score.