What do Humor Classifiers Learn? An Attempt to Explain Humor Recognition Models

Abstract

Towards computational systems capable of dealing with complex and general linguistic phenomena, it is essential to understand figurative language, which verbal humor is an instance of. This paper reports state-of-the-art results for Humor Recognition in Portuguese, specifically, an F1-score of 99.6% with a BERTbased classifier. However, following the surprising high performance in such a challenging task, we further analyzed what was actually learned by the classifiers. Our main conclusions were that classifiers based on contentfeatures achieve the best performance, but rely mostly on stylistic aspects of the text, not necessarily related to humor, such as punctuation and question words. On the other hand, for humor-related features, we identified some important aspects, such as the presence of named entities, ambiguity and incongruity.