Multilingual extension and evaluation of a poetry generator

Poetry generation is a specific kind of natural language generation where several sources of knowledge are typically exploited to handle features on different levels, such as syntax, semantics, form or aesthetics. But although this task has been addressed by several researchers, and targeted differe...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inNatural language engineering Vol. 23; no. 6; pp. 929 - 967
Main Authors OLIVEIRA, HUGO GONÇALO, HERVÁS, RAQUEL, DÍAZ, ALBERTO, GERVÁS, PABLO
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.11.2017
Subjects
Adaptation
Architecture
Artificial intelligence
Creativity
English language
International conferences
Languages
Natural language
Natural language generation
Neural networks
Poetry
Portuguese language
Seeds
Semantics
Spanish language
Syntax
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Summary:Poetry generation is a specific kind of natural language generation where several sources of knowledge are typically exploited to handle features on different levels, such as syntax, semantics, form or aesthetics. But although this task has been addressed by several researchers, and targeted different languages, all known systems have focused on a limited purpose and a single language. This article describes the effort of adapting the same architecture to generate poetry in three different languages – Portuguese, Spanish and English. An existing architecture is first described and complemented with the adaptations required for each language, including the linguistic resources used for handling morphology, syntax, semantics and metric scansion. An automatic evaluation was designed in such a way that it would be applicable to the target languages. It covered three relevant aspects of the generated poems, namely: the presence of poetic features, the variation of the linguistic structure and the semantic connection to a given topic. The automatic measures applied for the second and third aspect can be seen as novel in the evaluation of poetry. Overall, poems were successfully generated in the three languages addressed. Despite minor differences in different languages or seed words, poems revealed to have a regular metre, frequent rhymes, to exhibit an interesting degree of variation, and to be semantically-associated with the initially given seeds.
ISSN:1351-3249
1469-8110
DOI:10.1017/S1351324917000171