Generation of Japanese puns based on similarity of articulation

Generating puns is a language play by generating expressions with similar sounds. In this paper, similarity of sounds is hypothesized by the similarity of articulations. The similarity is calculated by the indices from how and where a sound is articulated. Its validity is checked by existent puns. A Japanese pun generating system based on similarity of articulations is also proposed. It selects a pun base expression from a word in a sentence, and changes the word into various similar expressions using the similarity of articulations. The system finds out grammatically correct word sequences from the expressions; then adds default expressions to generate a complete sentence with puns. An experiment shows the system can make various pun sentences from a base sentence