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BottleHumor: Self-Informed Humor Explanation using the Information Bottleneck Principle

2025· article· en· W4412887688 on OpenAlexfundno aff
EunJeong Hwang, Peter West, Vered Shwartz

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicHumor Studies and Applications
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaCanadian Institute for Advanced Research
KeywordsBottleneckComputer scienceInformation bottleneck methodArtificial intelligenceMutual information

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Humor is prevalent in online communications and it often relies on more than one modality (e.g., cartoons and memes).Interpreting humor in multimodal settings requires drawing on diverse types of knowledge, including metaphorical, sociocultural, and commonsense knowledge.However, identifying the most useful knowledge remains an open question.We introduce BOTTLEHUMOR, a method inspired by the information bottleneck principle that elicits relevant world knowledge from vision and language models which is iteratively refined for generating an explanation of the humor in an unsupervised manner.Our experiments on three datasets confirm the advantage of our method over a range of baselines.Our method can further be adapted in the future for additional tasks that can benefit from eliciting and conditioning on relevant world knowledge and open new research avenues in this direction.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.013
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.008
Threshold uncertainty score0.025

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.013
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0020.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.002
Bibliometrics0.0030.002
Science and technology studies0.0010.002
Scholarly communication0.0020.005
Open science0.0030.004
Research integrity0.0030.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.003

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.027
GPT teacher head0.381
Teacher spread0.354 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designSimulation or modeling
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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