A Blackboard System for Generating Poetry

2004

The ultimate goal of the poetry assistant currently under development in our lab is an application to be used either as a poetry game or as a teaching tool for both poetry and grammar, including the complex relationships between sound and meaning. Until now we focused on the automatic classification of poems and the suggestion of the ending word for a verse. The classification module is based on poetic concepts that take into account structure and metrics. The prediction module uses several criteria to select the ending word: the structural constraints of the poem, the grammatical category of the words, and the statistical language models obtained from a text corpus. The first version of the system, rather than being self-contained, is still based on the use of different heterogeneous modules. We are currently working on a second version based on a modular architecture that facilitates the reuse of the linguistic processing modules already developed within the lab.

Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Creativity in Natural Language Generation (CC-NLG 2017)

O Poeta Artificial is a bot that tweets poems, in Portuguese, inspired by the latest Twitter trends. Built on top of PoeTryMe, a poetry generation platform, so far it had only produced poems based on a set of keywords in tweets about a trend. This paper presents recently implemented features for increasing the connection between the produced text and the target trend through the reutilisation and production of new text fragments, for highlighting the trend, paraphrasing text by Twitter users, or based on extracted or inferred semantic relations.

1st Seminar of Art, Music, Creativity and Artificial …, 2009

This paper is about the automatic generation of creative text, more precisely the automatic generation of poetry. It starts by presenting two possible categorisations for systems that aim generating poetry and then makes a brief overview on the existing attempts to this subject based on what can be found in the literature.

2015

Existing systems for the automated generation of poetry often attempt to simplify the task by taking advantage of free-form poetry-to avoid the need to achieve rigorous poetic form-and poetic licence-to avoid the need of conveying a specific message at a semantic level. This is acceptable as an initial step, but once acceptable solutions have been found for the simplified version of the problem, progress can be made towards higher goals by enriching the initial problem statement. The present paper describes an attempt where an existing computer poet, originally developed to produce poems in a given form but with no specific constraints on their content, is put to the task of producing a set of poems with tighter restrictions on both form and content. Alternative generation methods are devised to overcome the difficulties, and the various insights arising from these new methods and the impact they have on the set of resulting poems are discussed in terms of their potential contribution to better poetry generation systems.

Proceedings of the …, 2012

We describe a corpus-based poetry generation system which uses templates to construct poems according to given constraints on rhyme, meter, stress, sentiment, word frequency and word similarity. Moreover, the software constructs a mood for the day by analysing newspaper articles; uses this to determine both an article to base a poem on and a template for the poem; creates an aesthetic based on relevance to the article, lyricism, sentiment and flamboyancy; searches for an instantiation of the template which maximises the aesthetic; and provides a commentary for the whole process to add value to the creative act. We describe the processes behind this approach, present some experimental results which helped in fine tuning, and provide some illustrative poems and commentaries. We argue that this is the first poetry system which generates examples, forms concepts, invents aesthetics and frames its work, and so can be assessed favourably with respect to the FACE model for comparing creative systems.

RATE Issues, 2024

This study explores the intersection of artificial intelligence and creative expression, focusing on the emergence of AI-generated poetry. It overviews existing literature on AI and its integration into literature, emphasizing AI poetry specifically. At the heart of this study are three poems generated by the AI model ChatGPT 4. Through a critical analysis of these poems and their prompts, the study found that, to a certain extent, AI can mirror human poetic expression producing complex poems with numerous literary devices. However, AI's creativity is constrained by training material, prompts, and prompters, signaling both AI's potential and limitations in shaping contemporary poetry.

2004

The ultimate goal of the poetry assistant currently under development in our lab is an application to be used either as a poetry game or as a teaching tool for both poetry and grammar, including the complex relationships between sound and meaning. Until now we focused on the automatic classification of poems and the suggestion of the ending word for a verse. The classification module is based on poetic concepts that take into account structure and metrics. The prediction module uses several criteria to select the ending word: the structural constraints of the poem, the grammatical category of the words, and the statistical language models obtained from a text corpus. The first version of the system, rather than being selfcontained, is still based on the use of different heterogeneous modules. We are currently working on a second version based on a modular architecture that facilitates the reuse of the linguistic processing modules already developed within the lab.

2013

Linguistic creativity is a marriage of form and content in which each works together to convey our meanings with concision, resonance and wit. Though form clearly influences and shapes our content, the most deft formal trickery cannot compensate for a lack of real insight. Before computers can be truly creative with language, we must first imbue them with the ability to formulate meanings that are worthy of creative expression. This is especially true of computer-generated poetry. If readers are to recognize a poetic turn-of-phrase as more than a superficial manipulation of words, they must perceive and connect with the meanings and the intent behind the words. So it is not enough for a computer to merely generate poem-shaped texts; poems must be driven by conceits that build an affective worldview. This paper describes a conceit-driven approach to computational poetry, in which metaphors and blends are generated for a given topic and affective slant. Subtle inferences drawn from th...

2019

In this paper, the authors propose a dialectic of pattern and randomness as an interpretative lens for electronic poetry. By examining the complex interplay of recurring patterns and randomly generated elements in two electronic poems, they demonstrate how poetry and code work together and how meaning can be made from randomly generated poetic works. They showcase two of their own electronic poetry projects as case studies, the poem Wayfarer’s Song (Okkema) and the Dada Poetry Generator (Hill). Wayfarer’s Song generates a Villanelle poem from a set of randomly chosen, pre-written verses. On the level of content, the poem exemplifies the interplay of pattern and randomness by juxtaposing arbitrary arrangement with the poetic pattern of Villanelle. Reading the poem in light of pattern and randomness reveals further layers of meaning on the levels of code, interface, and hardware. The Dada Poetry Generator engages users in creating poems from “found” texts. Because each iteration of th...

Humanist Studies and the Digital Age, (7)1, 1-27, 2022

This paper is about Artificial Intelligence (AI) attempts at writing poetry, usually referred to with the term "poetry generation". Poetry generation started in the Digital Humanities, which developed out of humanities computing; nowadays, however, it is part of Computational Creativity, a field that tackles several areas of art and science.