Exploring the Automatic Generation of Riddles in Portuguese

Authors

  • Hugo Gonçalo Oliveira CISUC, Universidade de Coimbra
  • Ricardo Rodrigues CISUC, Instituto Politécnico de Coimbra, Portugal

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21814/lm.10.1.268

Keywords:

riddle generation, computational humor, natural language generation, linguistic creativity, computational creativity, semantic relations

Abstract

This article describes several experiments towards the automatic generation of riddles in Portuguese, based on two known features of given concepts. In addition to making sense, one of our goals was to produce novel riddles, ideally, with some humour potential, at least when compared to the so called ``piadas secas'' (dry jokes).

Part of the challenge involved the identification of suitable linguistic resources for this goal, followed by setting rules for their exploitation, given some hypothesis that could increase their novelty and humouristic value. Finally, riddles were rendered as question-answer pairs.

The article is mainly focused on a kind of riddles, for which the generation model is dissected, some examples are presented, and a sample was manually classified by human judges, who, overall, rated them as coherent, moderately novel, but still with a low humor potential.

In order to show how much can still be done, namely about the humor value, the article also presents, briefly, two other experiments, still in an early stage.

References

Published

2018-08-04

Issue

Section

Research Articles

How to Cite

Exploring the Automatic Generation of Riddles in Portuguese. (2018). Linguamática, 10(1), 3-18. https://doi.org/10.21814/lm.10.1.268