Equivoque: Detection and Interpretation of English Puns

Abstract

In today's world, it has really become important to decipher the true, intended meaning of a sentence. This is useful at various platforms like: reading and comprehending reviews of a product or the actual meaning of posts on social media. In that context, we try to find out the meaning of a word with respect to the sentence in which it is used. The conventional approach rests on the assumption that each word conveys a single meaning to the sentence but this is not always true. In such approaches the presence of puns goes undetected which can give erroneous results. Pun is a form of wordplay that exploits multiple meanings of a word or of similar sounding words[13]. Pun is deliberately used to produce intended humorous or rhetorical effect. Equivoque is designed to successfully detect the presence or absence of a pun word in a sentence and to locate as well as interpret its multiple meanings. This paper provides detailed approach in this direction.