Japanese pun analyzer using articulation similarities

Generating puns is a language play by generating expressions with similar sounds in the sentence or in the context. Sentences with puns are not always grammatical. In the paper a Japanese pun analyzer is proposed. It uses similarities of sounds based on articulation similarities. Similarity of sounds is defined by the similarity of articulations. The proposed Japanese pun analyzer analyzes ungrammatical Japanese sentences by replacing ungrammatical parts of the sentences by pun expression candidates. The system analyzes an input sentence morphologically and finds out ungrammatical parts and selects them as a pun base; generates various pun candidates by replacing similar moras from the assumed pun base to check the existence of a pun expression; finds out grammatically correct word sequences from the replaced pun expression candidates. An experiment shows the system can analyze ungrammatical pun sentences