cmudict

What makes a thing funny? At its core, humor seems to be all about incongruity. Comic situations set up a context where something is marked or out of place. This oddness, far different to what we were led to expect or what we blithely assume is normal, is what makes things funny. [...] Dad jokes play with incongruity largely through linguistics and wordplay, rather than subject matter. The much-maligned pun is a mainstay of the dad joke. Puns, bad or good, have long fascinated researchers for their playful ability to tell a micro mystery, with its red herring clues in plain sight. . . . Through a trick of linguistics, words cleverly disguised like other words because of the way they sound or their different semantic senses can lead us in the wrong direction of meaning resolution, before we “get it.” After recently making a dad-joke ("Why

One improvement might be to use a pronunciation dictionary and map the emojis to actual sounds rather than characters. Having recently needed such a thing, I found that there are two widely available datasets: CMUdict and Moby Pronunciator: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?n... https://github.com/cmusphinx/cmudict The problem is that they'd be pretty hefty payloads to load on the client, so you'd want to do the text -> phone mapping elsewhere. Then use your character mapping as backup for words that aren't in the dictionaries.