A Novel Annotation Schema for Conversational Humor: Capturing the Cultural Nuances in Kanyasulkam (2020)

Abstract: Humor research is a multifaceted field that has led to a better understanding of humor’s psychological effects and the development of different theories of humor. This paper’s main objective is to develop a hierarchical schema for a fine-grained annotation of Conversational Humor. Based on the Benign Violation Theory, the benignity or non-benignity of the interlocutor’s intentions is included within the framework. Under the categories mentioned above, in addition to different types of humor, the techniques utilized by these types are identified. Furthermore, a prominent play from Telugu, Kanyasulkam, is annotated to substantiate the work across cultures at multiple levels. The inter-annotator agreement is calculated to assess the accuracy and validity of the dataset. An in-depth analysis of the disagreement is performed to understand the subjectivity of humor better.

## introduction humor and its dependence on society and culture have been the focus of research since times immemorial @xcite . from finding theories to define humor @xcite @xcite to an analysis of the perception of humor in jokes @xcite , humor studies have been proved to be an essential aspect of linguistic as well as sociological, psychological and philosophical research. many papers discuss types of humor @xcite @xcite , but this paper stands apart. it focuses on creating an annotation schema for conversational humor with a stage play as the medium of analysis while claiming that this schema can be used across languages. conversational humor is the spontaneous or pre-constructed interactional humor. the interlocutors intend to amuse the listener directly or shift to a humorous frame where there is humor beyond what the literal verbalizations convey @xcite . stage play is chosen as the medium of analysis since 'conversational humor' is an umbrella term that covers various semantic and pragmatic types of humor that occur in interpersonal conversation, both real-life and fictional @xcite . there are key differences between plays and other forms of discourse, like transcribed recordings of actual conversations or novels, justifying our use of stage play in the paper. the differences include but are not limited to pauses, pause fillers, and discourse markers as essential features of characterization in a play, unlike their use in actual conversations. in a play, there is more character-character interaction than in novels, which have more narration from one point of view @xcite . but the annotation schema presented here does not restrict its application on plays alone but can also cover novels, tv shows, movies, etc; essentially any genre that involves a premeditated conversation. this paper also focuses on how humor's form and function are influenced multiculturally by annotating one of the most famous plays of the telugu culture, kanyasulkam. studies show that culture plays a vital role in conversational humor in some distinct ways like the need for shared knowledge and standard references, and others more indirect, like how the importance given to language awareness by any culture dictates the preference for wit and linguistic play @xcite . kanyasulkam is a play set in the 19th century vijayanagaram which uses humor to talk about the social evils prevalent in the society. however, while the author talks about child marriages, widow re-marriage, and the nautch question, we also see him discuss customs and traditions, superstitions, use of english and the fascination towards it, etc. thus, making it culturally relevant and further justifying the use of kanyasulkam in validating the role of culture on humor. persona identification is an important application of the schema proposed. for instance, if character a has a tendency to sarcastically tease character b on most occasions, we gain an insight into a's sense of humor (soh) as well the social function performed by a. while there have been several studies that suggest that an soh indicates positive personality traits such as self-actualising, selfacceptance, and others @xcite , the social function performed by a also provides an understanding of a's overall role in the story, therefore the character's persona. ## related work interest in the study of humor has faced steady growth since 1970 @xcite . this interest in humor studies has led to a great deal of research on humor types and functions. in his paper on the issues in conversational joking, neal r. norrick (2003) talks about the structure of humorous discourse, the forms of conversational humor and its interpersonal functions, i.e., aggression vs. rapport. two of marta dynel's studies, one based on a popular english sitcom, friends (2011) and another on the sitcom, house (2013), are deemed relevant to this study. while the former analyses cultural references, the latter attempts to extract universal communicative phenomena that cause humor. dirk @xcite presents in her work, an overview of the humorous scenes with bilingual and translation-based situations from shakespeare's plays. @xcite uses natural semantic metalanguage to compare the danish concept of 'sort humor' (a highly culturally specific way of danish communication) and the english, 'black humor.' to recognize humor and irony in tweets, antonio @xcite analyze humor and irony to recognize these concepts in tweets. agnese @xcite have worked on building a chatbot that recognizes and generates humorous expressions. there have been continuous efforts in the field of computer science for the comprehension @xcite , detection @xcite , production @xcite , and recognition @xcite of conversational humor. ## data and annotation the full text of the telugu play, kanyasulkam, is annotated by two people, a1 and a2. for the preprocessing of the data, the whole text was split first by each character's dialogue, and each utterance by the character was further split into single sentences/segments. in the presence of poems, lists, etc. the utterance remains as is, and this final output is used for annotation giving a total of 6645 segments to be annotated. after developing the gold standard corpus (can be found here), 2710 utterances were classified as humorous, 1782 were given the tag dialogue, 1881 conversational, and 892 benign. the annotation was done with appropriate checkpoints after every 2000 segments to identify any new techniques or revise the schema. ## annotation schema types: teasing(t), retort(r), banter(ba), schadenfreude(s) techniques: dramatic irony(dirn), sarcasm(src), satire(str), fallacious reasoning(fr), exaggeration(ex), use of foreign language(fl), allusion(a), profanity(p), other stylistic figures(o) (refer to this study uses @xcite conceptualization of conversational humor. as the dataset used here is a play, it is of primal importance to note that the speaker's intent may not be to cause humor. however, a third-party present, or the metarecipients of the conversation, the audience/readers, may find it humorous. it is a common phenomenon to make the audience laugh at the expense of a fictional character. this study makes a distinction between conversational and non-conversational humor. in the latter, the humor does not exist in the realm of verbality but rather in the domain of the situation (slapstick humor, a character's trait such as miserliness, stupidity, etc.) for example, when a cowardly character is badmouthing his rival and the latter appears just then. ## disagreement analysis the validity of the tag set and their definitions are measured using cohen's kappa (κ) @xcite . ## conclusion and future work the paper describes the work done on developing a fine-grained hierarchical annotation schema for conversational humor. the annotation was performed on a relevant dataset, a prominent telugu play called kanyasulkam. the inter-annotator disagreement highlighted the complexity of the task as well as the domain itself. as mentioned in the introduction, the schema can be utilised for persona identification, a use case especially beneficial for the literary field. for example, when analysing a shakespearean character, analysing their sense of humor may help the researcher recognize their pertinent traits. this study also finds that inclusion of cultural nuances in the play has a significant effect on the perception of humor. further, this annotation schema can be applied to other culturally significant works by utilizing the analysis provided in this work. however, when applying this schema to other works, it is to be noted that the types and techniques listed here are non-exhaustive and more can be added based on the language and cultural significance of the data being annotated. if a computer were to generate humor, the traditional meaning would mean that it could generate "jokes" (knock-knock jokes, etc.) but would fail to generate conversational humor. it is believed that this work will aid in automating this process.