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From Humour to Hatred: A Computational Analysis of Off-Colour Humour

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Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing (NLPCC 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 11109))

Abstract

Off-colour humour is a category of humour which is considered by many to be in poor taste or overly vulgar. Most commonly, off-colour humour contains remarks on particular ethnic group or gender, violence, domestic abuse, acts concerned with sex, excessive swearing or profanity. Blue humour, dark humour and insult humour are types of off-colour humour. Blue and dark humour unlike insult humour are not outrightly insulting in nature but are often misclassified because of the presence of insults and harmful speech. As the primary contributions of this paper we provide an original data-set consisting of nearly 15,000 instances and a novel approach towards resolving the problem of separating dark and blue humour from offensive humour which is essential so that free-speech on the internet is not curtailed. Our experiments show that deep learning methods outperforms other n-grams based approaches like SVM’s, Naive Bayes and Logistic Regression by a large margin.

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Correspondence to Vikram Ahuja .

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Ahuja, V., Mamidi, R., Singh, N. (2018). From Humour to Hatred: A Computational Analysis of Off-Colour Humour. In: Zhang, M., Ng, V., Zhao, D., Li, S., Zan, H. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing. NLPCC 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11109. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99501-4_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99501-4_12

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-99500-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-99501-4

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