Programmatic poetry: oh noetry!

Automatic generation of texts has been on my mind for rather a while. Particularly, I've been thinking about poetry and the what characterizes it, in contrast to, say, technical manuals or want ads. Some (five?) years ago, my cohort Esther and I had set at the generation problem from an ontology standpoint, trying to figure out what it would take to get thematic relationships into an automatic poem. We didn't get very far, probably because at that point my first instinct was to code everything from scratch in C!

Anyway, it turns out that there are non-me people interested in this sort of thing, and the ever-helpful Graham has pointed out a bunch of interesting things happening in the field!

- The prosthetic imagination is a blog by a one Jim Carpenter, who's been working on Erica T. Carter (aka "the electronic text composition project", mentioned on GrandTextAuto here), which uses probabilistic grammars to generate free verse poems. I think the output is pretty convincing ("convincingly what?"); according to Mr. Carpenter, it's rather unnerving to readers who've been informed that they were composed by machine.

It's interesting how people react, when confronted with "creativity" from a non-human source; one is reminded of Douglas Hofstadter's surprising reaction to David Cope's lovely work with algorithmic music composition, which makes music, in a sense, in the style of other composers.

I'll have to read more, but I'm not entirely sure, if it's just using hierarchical grammars, how Erica is different from The Postmodernism Generator (the best-known use of the world-famous dada engine)... but I'll report back on this later.

- There is an Electronic Poetry Center at Buffalo. Interesting!

- Gnoetry is another system out there, and a very prolific one at that, apparently connected to this super-fascinating Beard of Bees publishing group. Language is a prosthesis of an ancient neuro-chemical regime; but now the chemical author is dead. Gnoetry places language at a remove from its typical sources: pre-conscious governance, psycho-historical flux, conscious-mind narration. YES. I will be getting in contact with these guys.

- At upenn, they have a series of readings, M^<4|\3, with all sorts of "literary uses of technology" things going on, including, next week, Flarf poetry (!) .

- Speaking of literary uses of technology, the GTR Language Workbench looks like something between Eclipse and a word processor... I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet.

I'm all excited. Let's get hacking.

rapid-feedback poetry and lisp environments

I think, ultimately, TEB is going to want to be less of a fully automated thing and more of a computer-aided composition tool for poetry. Or maybe it'd be better to think of it as a generator, with a human in the loop. Something that would let you get really rapid feedback and come up with suggestions. It would let you build poetry by search, recognizing what you like and what you don't like. And it'll keep versioning information...

Hey, speaking of development environments! On Lemonodor, I just found out that there's an Eclipse plugin for writing Lisp called Cusp. It uses SBCL and swank, like all right-thinking lispers, letting you do SLIME-like things without Emacs -- SLIME being the currently en-vogue common lisp development environment, and swank being the backend. There's a similar project out there that I've been watching too -- Slim-Vim, which is an attempt to make that same swank code work with vim. (the mailing list has been a little quiet, but it might pick up steam again)

"Here, lemme take a Pikachu..."

So say that you want to pepper your speech with non-sequitur references to some particular topic -- like whenever you use a string of words that rhymes with the name of a Pokémon name, replace that string with the name of said Pokémon.

That wouldn't be that hard -- there's a pretty happenin' metric for finding rhymes, ready to go.

So you'd just have to have a list of the words for the domain you want to substitute in, make sure that you have phonetic descriptions of each of them (Bradley Buda's rhyme metric uses the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary's format)... then run through your input text searching for substrings that rhyme with words in your list with a score over some particular threshold. And hilarity ensues.

A similar technique could be used for generating phrases like "my feet are staying!" for "auf wiedersehen!" -- you could something hill-climbing-like (with a parser in the loop, so as to try to maintain grammaticality) to substitute out common phrases...

The only problem is -- what rhymes with "Psyduck"?