Generating Interactive Japanese Puns Based on Phoneme Similarity

Dajare, a form of Japanese pun, utilizes phonetically identical or similar words and phrases with different meanings to create a funny effect. This paper presents a method for generating interactive Dajare, a Japanese pun formed by a response that includes a segment phonetically similar to a part of the original utterance. Our approach involves retrieving candidate words and phrases based on phoneme similarity. We then leverage large language models (LLMs) to generate response sentences for these candidates, which are subsequently ranked according to conversational naturalness to select the most suitable interactive Dajare. Our experiment revealed that the proposed approach, by explicitly providing a phonetically similar segment, makes it easier for annotators to identify interactive Dajare compared to the baseline, which generates them without providing such a segment. This suggests that our method more effectively produces recognizable interactive Dajare. Additionally, the results showed that word selection positively influences the perceived cleverness (the ingenuity of transforming words with similar pronunciations) of interactive Dajare than on its funniness. Furthermore, current LLMs still fall significantly short of human capabilities in generating genuinely funny text.