Text Is Not All You Need: Multimodal Prompting Helps LLMs Understand Humor

Ashwin Baluja

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arXiv · 2412.05315

Text Is Not All You Need: Multimodal Prompting Helps LLMs Understand Humor

Ashwin Baluja

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Abstract

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive natural language understanding capabilities across various text-based tasks, understanding humor has remained a persistent challenge. Humor is frequently multimodal, relying on phonetic ambiguity, rhythm and timing to convey meaning. In this study, we explore a simple multimodal prompting approach to humor understanding and explanation. We present an LLM with both the text and the spoken form of a joke, generated using an off-the-shelf text-to-speech (TTS) system. Using multimodal cues improves the explanations of humor compared to textual prompts across all tested datasets.

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Ashwin Baluja. 2024-12-01. Text Is Not All You Need: Multimodal Prompting Helps LLMs Understand Humor. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.05315

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