Question: Is this study one of the first attempts to use Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in the recognition of humor in presentations?
Evidence: Our CNN-based text classification's setup follows Kim2014. Figure FIGREF17 depicts the model's details. From the left side's input texts to the right side's prediction labels, different shapes of tensors flow through the entire network for solving the classification task in an end-to-end mode.
Firstly, tokenized text strings were converted to a INLINEFORM0 tensor with shape INLINEFORM1 , where INLINEFORM2 represents sentences' maximum length while INLINEFORM3 represents the word-embedding dimension. In this study, we utilized the Word2Vec BIBREF4 embedding vectors ( INLINEFORM4 ) that were trained on 100 billion words of Google News. Next, the embedding matrix was fed into a INLINEFORM5 convolution network with multiple filters. To cover varied reception fields, we used filters of sizes of INLINEFORM6 , INLINEFORM7 , and INLINEFORM8 . For each filter size, INLINEFORM9 filters were utilized. Then, max pooling, which stands for finding the largest value from a vector, was applied to each feature map (total INLINEFORM10 feature maps) output by the INLINEFORM11 convolution. Finally, maximum values from all of INLINEFORM12 filters were formed as a flattened vector to go through a fully connected (FC) layer to predict two possible labels (Laughter vs. No-Laughter). Note that for INLINEFORM13 convolution and FC layer's input, we applied `dropout' BIBREF10 regularization, which entails randomly setting a proportion of network weights to be zero during model training, to overcome over-fitting. By using cross-entropy as the learning metric, the whole sequential network (all weights and bias) could be optimized by using any SGD optimization, e.g., Adam BIBREF13 , Adadelta BIBREF14 , and so on.

We used two corpora: the TED Talk corpus (denoted as TED) and the Pun of the Day corpus (denoted as Pun). Note that we normalized words in the Pun data to lowercase to avoid a possibly elevated result caused by a special pattern: in the original format, all negative instances started with capital letters. The Pun data allows us to verify that our implementation is consistent with the work reported in yang-EtAl:2015:EMNLP2.
In our experiment, we firstly divided each corpus into two parts. The smaller part (the Dev set) was used for setting various hyper-parameters used in text classifiers. The larger portion (the CV set) was then formulated as a 10-fold cross-validation setup for obtaining a stable and comprehensive model evaluation result. For the PUN data, the Dev contains 482 sentences, while the CV set contains 4344 sentences. For the TED data, the Dev set contains 1046 utterances, while the CV set contains 8406 utterances. Note that, with a goal of building a speaker-independent humor detector, when partitioning our TED data set, we always kept all utterances of a single talk within the same partition. To our knowledge, this is the first time that such a strict experimental setup has been used in recognizing humor in conversations, and it makes the humor recognition task on the TED data quite challenging.
When building conventional models, we developed our own feature extraction scripts and used the SKLL python package for building Random Forest models. When implementing CNN, we used the Keras Python package. Regarding hyper-parameter tweaking, we utilized the Tree Parzen Estimation (TPE) method as detailed in TPE. After running 200 iterations of tweaking, we ended up with the following selection: INLINEFORM0 is 6 (entailing that the various filter sizes are INLINEFORM1 ), INLINEFORM2 is 100, INLINEFORM3 is INLINEFORM4 and INLINEFORM5 is INLINEFORM6 , optimization uses Adam BIBREF13 . When training the CNN model, we randomly selected INLINEFORM7 of the training data as the validation set for using early stopping to avoid over-fitting.
On the Pun data, the CNN model shows consistent improved performance over the conventional model, as suggested in BIBREF3 . In particular, precision has been greatly increased from INLINEFORM0 to INLINEFORM1 . On the TED data, we also observed that the CNN model helps to increase precision (from INLINEFORM2 to INLINEFORM3 ) and accuracy (from INLINEFORM4 to INLINEFORM5 ). The empirical evaluation results suggest that the CNN-based model has an advantage on the humor recognition task. In addition, focusing on the system development time, generating and implementing those features in the conventional model would take days or even weeks. However, the CNN model automatically learns its optimal feature representation and can adjust the features automatically across data sets. This makes the CNN model quite versatile for supporting different tasks and data domains. Compared with the humor recognition results on the Pun data, the results on the TED data are still quite low, and more research is needed to fully handle humor in authentic presentations.
Our CNN-based text classification’s setup follows Kim (2014). Figure 2 depicts the model’s details. From the left side’s input texts to the right side’s prediction labels, different shapes of tensors flow through the entire network for solving the classification task in an end-to-end mode.****To our knowledge, this is the first time that such a strict experimental setup has been used in recognizing humor in conversations, and it makes the humor recognition task on the TED data quite challenging.
Answer: Yes.