CLEF Workshop JOKER: Automatic Wordplay and Humour Translation

Abstract. Humour remains one of the most difficult aspects of intercultural communication: understanding humour often requires understanding implicit cultural references and/or double meanings, and this raises the question of its (un)translatability. Wordplay is a common source of humour in due to its attention-getting and subversive character. The translation of humour and wordplay is therefore in high demand. Modern translation depends heavily on technological aids, yet few works have treated the automation of humour and wordplay translation, or the creation of humour corpora. The goal of the JOKER workshop is to bring together translators and computer scientists to work on an evaluation framework for wordplay, including data and metric development, and to foster work on automatic methods for wordplay translation. We propose three pilot tasks: (1) classify and explain instances of wordplay, (2) translate single words containing wordplay, and (3) translate entire phrases containing wordplay.