That’s What She Said: Double Entendre Identification by Chloé Kiddon and Yuriy Brun.
Abstract:
Humor identification is a hard natural language understanding problem. We identify a subproblem — the “that’s what she said” problem—with two distinguishing characteristics: (1) use of nouns that are euphemisms for sexually explicit nouns and (2) structure common in the erotic domain. We address this problem in a classification approach that includes features that model those two characteristics. Experiments on web data demonstrate that our approach improves precision by 12% over baseline techniques that use only word-based features.
A highly entertaining paper that examines a particular type of double entendre, which is itself a particular type of metaphor.
The authors note:
A “that’s what she said” (TWSS) joke is a type of double entendre. A double entendre, or adianoeta, is an expression that can be understood in two different ways: an innocuous, straightforward way, given the context, and a risqué way that indirectly alludes to a different, indecent context. To our knowledge, related research has not studied the task of identifying double entendres in text or speech. The task is complex and would require both deep semantic and cultural understanding to recognize the vast array of double entendres. We focus on a subtask of double entendre identification: TWSS recognition. We say a sentence is a TWSS if it is funny to follow that sentence with “that’s what she said”. (emphasis added)
It would be interesting to see a crowd-sourced topic map project on double entendre.
BTW, strictly for non-office enjoyment, see: TWSS, a site that collects TWSS stories.