Humor in Word Embeddings:Cockamamie Gobbledegook for NincompoopsWARNING: This paper contains words that people rated humorous including many that are offensive in nature.
Table 7: Among our set of 216 words (including phrases), the ten with most confident differences in ratings across gender (again using a two-sided t-test and Bonferoni correction).
['Word rated funnier by F whakapapa', 'adjusted p-value 3.2e-04', 'Word rated funnier by M sexual napalm', 'adjusted p-value 2.1e-11']
Interesting differences emerged. (see appendix), strings in the female-dominated cluster (Cluster 1) were rated as more “funny-sounding” while strings in the male-dominated cluster (Cluster 5) scored higher on sexual connotation and juxtapositions. The “older” cluster 3 rated words with scatological connotations as more humorous as well as insults and informal words. While none of the humor features we mentioned stand out for clusters 2 or 4, the clustering suggests new features that may be worth examining in a further study. For instance, Cluster 4 appears to highly rate unfamiliar words that may be surprising merely by the fact that they are words at all. (see appendix) reports the strings that males and females differed most on, sorted by confidence in the difference. It is interesting that the WE recovers gender with a nontrivial degree of accuracy from the sense-of-humor embeddings. In the next section, we discuss predicting humor features, many of which emerged naturally in the clusters, using word embedding vectors.