Jujeop: K orean Puns for K-pop Stars on Social Media (2021)

Abstract: Jujeop is a type of pun and a unique way for fans to express their love for the K-pop stars they follow using Korean. One of the unique characteristics of Jujeop is its use of exaggerated expressions to compliment K-pop stars, which contain or lead to humor. Based on this characteristic, Jujeop can be separated into four distinct types, with their own lexical collocations: (1) Fragmenting words to create a twist, (2) Homophones and homographs, (3) Repetition, and (4) Nonsense. Thus, the current study first defines the concept of Jujeop in Korean, manually labels 8.6K comments and annotates the comments to one of the four Jujeop types. With the given annotated corpus, this study presents distinctive characteristics of Jujeop comments compared to the other comments by classification task. Moreover, with the clustering approach, we proposed a structural dependency within each Jujeop type. We have made our dataset publicly available for future research of Jujeop expressions.

## introduction with the rapid improvement of information and telecommunication technologies, people have become not only consumers, but also producers of media content @xcite . with this trend, there are a number of online media platforms that allow people to interact with other users anywhere and anytime @xcite . on these platforms, users actively create and share their contents, and express their thoughts and opinions on other users' contents @xcite . in particular, online fan communities, where fans interact with each other, tend to use such platforms to share their contents and opinions on their favorite stars (e.g., ariana grande 1 , bts 2 ; @xcite ; littlejohn and foss ( 2009 )). with this vitalization of the communities on the platforms, several novel interaction patterns have been observed among south korean users. among these patterns, jujeop in online environments is one of the notable phenomena presented by south korean fans (figure 1 ). although the dictionary definition of the korean word jujeop refers to a disgraceful or silly behavior of a person, the term has evolved into a facetious expression with an implicit sense of humor in the online k-pop community; in south korean culture, jujeop is a punning activity that makes conversations enjoyable and allows users to engage on platforms @xcite . miller and his colleagues @xcite defined a pun as "a form of wordplay in which a word suggests two or more meanings by exploiting polysemy, homonymy, or phonological similarity to another word, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect." based on this definition, the majority of recent studies have proposed several pun generation models using machine learning approaches @xcite . however, compared to a huge body of prior research on english puns @xcite , only a few studies have been conducted on korean puns in online environments. because of some obstacles including the unique linguistic and cultural aspects of south korea, there are several limitations in studying users' punning activities @xcite . thus, we propose the first korean corpus, annotated for jujeop comments, and categorize them into four different types. we have made the dataset publicly available. 3 2 jujeop data ## experiments we conducted two nlp tasks to investigate whether the labeled data can be significant in understand-ing jujeop comments. first, we proposed several deep learning models to verify the annotated jujeop comments. then, we clustered jujeop comments to figure out specific linguistic structures. ## conclusion the current study first conceptualized the construct of jujeop, which is one of the korean pun interaction patterns on social media and annotated 8,650 comments. to provide a better understanding of jujeop comments, four separate jujeop types were proposed and labeled. then, the presented nlp tasks results imply that jujeop comments and each type of jujeop has semantic and syntactic distinctiveness compared to the other comments. although we provide several findings on jujeop comments, notable limitations remain. first, there are limited number of each type of jujeop comments. moreover, there might be other jujeop types that were not observed in this study. the presented limitations might have occurred from the fact that the examples of jujeop may be hard to collect in the wild. thus, future study should aim to overcome the presented limitations with a crowd sourcing experiment or sentence generation based on the given definition to make a corpora of various jujeop comments.