PunCAT is an interactive prototype tool for the computer-assisted translation of puns. While it can be relatively easily adapted to work with any pair of languages for which wordnets are available, it currently supports only translation from English into German.
PunCAT is distributed as source code that must first be compiled. It depends on GermaNet, a proprietary resource that you must obtain separately and copy into the PunCAT directory structure. Please refer to the complete instructions for building, installing, and running PunCAT.
The purpose and operation of PunCAT are described in detail in the two
papers cited in the following section. To begin translating puns with
PunCAT, you must first open a corpus file using its File > Open
corpus command. Sample corpus files are provided in the
src/main/resources/puns directory. You
can also prepare your own corpus file according to the format
described by the XML schema
src/main/resources/puns/puncat.dtd;
the values of the first_sense and second_sense attributes should
correspond to sense
keys from
WordNet 3.0.
If you wish to modify or further develop PunCAT, you can read about how to set up your development environment.
To refer to PunCAT in a scholarly work, please cite either or both of the following publications:
- Waltraud Kolb and Tristan Miller. "Human–computer interaction in pun translation." In James Hadley, Kristiina Taivalkoski-Shilov, Carlos S. C. Teixeira, and Antonio Toral, editors, Using Technologies for Creative-Text Translation. Routledge, 2022. To appear.
- Tristan Miller. "The punster's amanuensis: The proper place of humans and machines in the translation of wordplay." In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Human-Informed Translation and Interpreting Тechnology (HiT-IT 2019), pages 57–64, September 2019. DOI: 10.26615/issn.2683-0078.2019_007.
PunCAT was designed and written by Tristan Miller and Máté Lajkó of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI). Development was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under project M 2625-N31 (Computational Pun-derstanding).
PunCAT is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
Bug reports and feature requests can be made on the issue tracker.
Please direct any other questions or comments to Tristan Miller.