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 language | English |
---|---|
Title of host publication | NAACL HLT 2009 - Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity, Proceedings of the Workshop |
Editors | Anna Feldman, Birte Loenneker-Rodman |
Publisher | Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) |
Pages | 32-39 |
Number of pages | 8 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781932432367 |
State | Published - 2009 |
Externally published | Yes |
Event | 2009 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity, CALC 2009 - Boulder, United States Duration: 4 Jun 2009 → … |
Publication series
Name | NAACL HLT 2009 - Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity, Proceedings of the Workshop |
---|
Conference
Conference | 2009 Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity, CALC 2009 |
---|---|
Country/Territory | United States |
City | Boulder |
Period | 4/06/09 → … |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:©2009 Association for Computational Linguistics.