---
title: "FunnyBorg at SemEval-2026 Task 1: Humor Generation (2026)"
description: "Their first design was a set of REST microservices: a Runner that orchestrates calls, a Validator, a Translator, an… Cited by 1 paper here."
authors: ["Stefan Oprea", "Lacrimioara Toma Oprea", "Maria Paval-Istrate", "Diana Trandabat", "Daniela Gifu"]
year: 2026
venue: "Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2026.semeval-1.427/"
doi: "10.18653/v1/2026.semeval-1.427"
licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/oprea-2026-funnyborg-semeval-2026-task-1/"
---
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# FunnyBorg at SemEval-2026 Task 1: Humor Generation

**Authors:** Stefan Oprea, Lacrimioara Toma Oprea, Maria Paval-Istrate, [Diana Trandabat](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/diana-trandabat/) and [Daniela Gifu](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/daniela-gifu/) · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/semeval/) ([SemEval 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/semeval/2026/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2026.semeval-1.427/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2026.semeval-1.427.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/2026.semeval-1.427](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.semeval-1.427) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7166835660)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · 1 in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
This system description covers the FunnyBorg team's entry to SemEval-2026 Task 1 (MWAHAHA), a shared task on generating computational humor. Most LLM research targets STEM rather than humor, and LLMs struggle with phonetics and pragmatic inference. The task had two parts. Subtask A asked for jokes in English, Spanish and Chinese, built either from a news headline or around two required words. Subtasks B1 and B2 involved GIFs: B1 required a funny caption, and B2 required filling the blanks in a given caption.

The team relied on prompt engineering with a voting step. Their first design was a set of REST microservices: a Runner that orchestrates calls, a Validator, a Translator, an image-recognition service, several prompt-building services, Prompters that call LLMs, and an Evaluator that picks the funniest candidate. They also built a simpler pipeline of TSV-processing steps run in Google Colab. A Gemma model generated the jokes. The entry ranked first in one subtask and second in three others, which suggests careful prompting of a modest model can compete well.

## Key points
- Subtasks: A (headline-based or two-word jokes in English, Spanish and Chinese), B1 (GIF captioning) and B2 (fill-in-the-blank GIF captions). The team placed 1st in one subtask and 2nd in three.
- The microservice design had these components:
  - Runner, which orchestrates the other services.
  - Validator, which checks joke length and mandatory words.
  - Translator, which handles EN/ES/ZH.
  - Image recognition, which extracts hints from GIFs.
  - Several Prompt engineerers, each optionally using its own joke-class database.
  - Prompters, which call the LLMs.
  - Humor Evaluator, which selects the best joke.
- The authors discuss security trade-offs of the microservice design, especially prompt injection, along with mitigations such as authentication, sanitizing prompts and restricting LLM capabilities.
- The alternative pipeline passes TSV files between steps in Google Colab. It handles failures with retry loops and append-mode output files with deduplication.
- The model could not accept GIFs, so a single PNG frame was extracted from each one. Its description was generated once and cached (memoized) in a hints TSV file. Gemma performed well despite being smaller than Gemini.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Alexandru Ioan Cuza University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/alexandru-ioan-cuza-university/) — University, Iași, Romania · 8 works · 402 citations
- [Romanian Academy](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/labs/romanian-academy/) — Research institute, Bucharest, Romania · 8 works · 841 citations

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## Cite

Cite as: Stefan Oprea, Lacrimioara Toma Oprea, Maria Paval-Istrate, Diana Trandabat and Daniela Gifu. 2026. FunnyBorg at SemEval-2026 Task 1: Humor Generation. Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{oprea2026funnyborg,
  title = {{FunnyBorg at SemEval-2026 Task 1: Humor Generation}},
  author = {Stefan Oprea, Lacrimioara Toma Oprea, Maria Paval-Istrate, Diana Trandabat and Daniela Gifu},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 20th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (2026)},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.semeval-1.427},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.semeval-1.427}
}
```

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