Gaiku: Generating Haiku with Word Associations Norms

Yael Netzer, David Gabay, Yoav Goldberg, Michael Elhadad

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

58 Scopus citations

Abstract

Word associations are an important element of linguistic creativity. Traditional lexical knowledge bases such as WordNet formalize a limited set of systematic relations among words, such as synonymy, polysemy and hypernymy. Such relations maintain their systematicity when composed into lexical chains. We claim that such relations cannot explain the type of lexical associations common in poetic text. We explore in this paper the usage of Word Association Norms (WANs) as an alternative lexical knowledge source to analyze linguistic computational creativity. We specifically investigate the Haiku poetic genre, which is characterized by heavy reliance on lexical associations. We first compare the density of WAN-based word associations in a corpus of English Haiku poems to that of WordNet-based associations as well as in other non-poetic genres. These experiments confirm our hypothesis that the non-systematic lexical associations captured in WANs play an important role in poetic text. We then present Gaiku, a system to automatically generate Haikus from a seed word and using WAN-associations. Human evaluation indicate that generated Haikus are of lesser quality than human Haikus, but a high proportion of generated Haikus can confuse human readers, and a few of them trigger intriguing reactions.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationNAACL HLT 2009 - Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity, Proceedings of the Workshop
EditorsAnna Feldman, Birte Loenneker-Rodman
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages32-39
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781932432367
StatePublished - 2009
Externally publishedYes
Event2009 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity, CALC 2009 - Boulder, United States
Duration: 4 Jun 2009 → …

Publication series

NameNAACL HLT 2009 - Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity, Proceedings of the Workshop

Conference

Conference2009 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity, CALC 2009
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBoulder
Period4/06/09 → …

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
©2009 Association for Computational Linguistics.

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