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International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

HCII 2019: HCI International 2019 - Posters pp 61–68Cite as

Automatic Generation of Homophonic Transformation for Japanese Wordplay Based on Edit Distance and Phrase Breaks

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Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1033))

Abstract

Humor is important to establish more natural and enjoyable human–computer interactions. This research aims to understand the humor mechanism of “soramimi,” which is a typical wordplay in Japan. Soramimi denotes a wordplay of replacing words in a well-known text with different words of similar pronunciation. It is empirically known that the humorous effect of soramimi is enhanced for a case where the vocabulary to be used is limited to a particular category. Although psychological and neuroscience studies focus on how speech misperceptions such as soramimi occurs, it is still unclear why a humorous effect is achieved. As a first step to understand the mechanism of soramimi humor, we developed a system called “soramimic,” that can automatically transform Japanese input text into a similar-sounding sequence of words from a particular vocabulary category using dynamic programming. The dissimilarity of phoneme estimated from the edit distance and concordance rate of phrase breaks were chosen as a parameter to be optimized. Forty-six test subjects evaluated the similarity of pronunciation between the output sequence composed of only country names and its original input sentence. Results suggest that both the edit distance and concordance rate of phrase breaks are correlated with a subjective evaluation of the similarity.

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Acknowledgement

This research was supported by “Program for Leading Graduate Schools” of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University, Toyonaka, Osaka, Japan

    Jiro Shimaya & Yutaka Nakamura

  2. Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences, Osaka University, Suita, Japan

    Nao Hanyu

Authors
  1. Jiro Shimaya
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  2. Nao Hanyu
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  3. Yutaka Nakamura
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jiro Shimaya .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Crete and Foundation for Research and Technology – Hellas (FORTH), Heraklion, Crete, Greece

    Constantine Stephanidis

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Shimaya, J., Hanyu, N., Nakamura, Y. (2019). Automatic Generation of Homophonic Transformation for Japanese Wordplay Based on Edit Distance and Phrase Breaks. In: Stephanidis, C. (eds) HCI International 2019 - Posters. HCII 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1033. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23528-4_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23528-4_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-23527-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-23528-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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