Computer-generated poetry

[lemur]

I don't know if the logic of . . .

os-cil-at-ing sy-la-bles

can be pro-grammed com-plete-ly

al-go-rhy-thm-rhyth-mic-ly

Edited February 5, 2011 by lemur

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

It can, in a sense. I can extract which syllables are stressed and unstressed from my pronouncing dictionary. However, when I'm constrained to the variety of words in my source text, finding a word with good rhythm to go next can be difficult.

 

I am thinking of trying a more flexible approach in my next incarnation of the system.

[lemur]

It can, in a sense. I can extract which syllables are stressed and unstressed from my pronouncing dictionary. However, when I'm constrained to the variety of words in my source text, finding a word with good rhythm to go next can be difficult.

 

I am thinking of trying a more flexible approach in my next incarnation of the system.

If you had the rhythm pattern: hlhlhll hlhlhll, could you program the generator to seek combinations of words that fit together with the given rhythm, regardless of word-length?

E.g. "a sil-ly mix of nox-ous words" or "un-der-min-ing rhy-me's absurd?"

I.e. can you get it to only generate lines of text with the given rhythm pattern regardless of the word-breaks?

I think it also needs to know how to start with a logical sentence and transform it into one that fits in the required rhythmic pattern (though I don't think that can be programmed).

 

new idea: what if it started by identifying compete sentences from the source-text that fit the assigned rhythm pattern and then searched for rhyming sentences that also fit the rhythm pattern? Would that take a long time?

Edited February 5, 2011 by lemur

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

I tried to get an alternating rhythm implemented. There's some details to work out, though: Can a single-syllable word be either stressed or unstressed depending on the words around it? Am I allowed to make two-syllable words stressed backwards to fit in? It's kind of complicated.

 

I'm thinking I may have to try a different approach, similar to how this thing works:

 

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

[edde addad]

Can a single-syllable word be either stressed or unstressed depending on the words around it? Am I allowed to make two-syllable words stressed backwards to fit in?

 

Hi Cap'n Refsmmat, fascinating work.

 

You mention some issues with rhythm. Check out the publications of Kevin Knight at ISI, he had papers at ACL this year and last about computationally detecting rhythm in poetry, though last I heard he had the same difficulties you describe with context and single-syllable words. Also try to find Charles Hartman's book "Virtual Muse", which discusses the meter-analyzing poem Scandroid (which is available on the web, its documentation also describes the algorithm it uses) I think he addresses the second question quoted above. If you really want to get into automated metrical markup, there's a pretty good bibliography out there, too.

 

You may be interested in some of the other n-gram poetry generators out there, check out the guide to interactive poetry generation systems I wrote on netpoetic.com.

 

If you're still using word 4-grams, I think the corpus size requirements will constrain you. Personally I think trying to remove the human from the creative process is ultimately impossible (after all, a human wrote the program and sets the parameters...) so I embrace interactivity. Take a look at the group blog Gnoetry Daily, we use interactive and unsupervised word and character n-gram generators, stochastic beam search with phonemic evaluations, rule-based generators, word-substitution techniques, and similar approaches to generate poems.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Wow, I hadn't realized there had been so much work on the subject already. My cursory Googling didn't come up with any of this. Unfortunately I don't have the time anymore -- I have some other pet projects to work on, so the poetry has to wait. Perhaps the next time I'm bored I'll take another look through. Thanks for the links!