Overview of the CLEF 2022 JOKER Task 1: Classify and Explain Instances of Wordplay

As a multidisciplinary field of study, humour remains one of the most difficult aspects of intercultural communication. Understanding humor often involves understanding implicit cultural references and/or double meanings, which raises the questions of how to detect and classify instances of this complex phenomenon. This paper provides an overview of Pilot Task 1 of the CLEF 2022 JOKER track, where participants had to classify and explain instances of wordplay. We introduce a new classification of wordplay and a new annotation scheme for wordplay interpretation suitable both for phrase-based wordplay and wordplay in named entities. We describe the collection of our data, our task setup, and the evaluation procedure, and we give a brief overview of the participating teams’ approaches and results.