I'm attending a morning workshop in Edinburgh on Computational Creativity in Natural Language Generation. My thoughts on the train ride up were pretty interesting. I was reading the book Renku Reckoner and spotted some pretty cool things in there. I was particularly struck by some passages about "person and place" in the renga/renku form.
One of the things that was really interesting here is the notion of different kinds of "linking" which I take to be a kind of contact function between verses in the poem. Because of the specific formal constraints on renku, we get something with a Simondonian flavor:
At its simplest Shofu renku can be seen as a strand of poetry which opens continuously outward. (p. 97)
The constraint is that with a sequence of verses A, B, C, D, verse C should "link" to B, but "shift" away from A. This link-shift frame moves one step to the right when we come to compose D. So we get a kind of continually-building sequence of associations. It brings to mind the so-called Chinese perspective (cf., e.g., "Chinese Perspective as a Rational System: Relationship to Panofsky’s Symbolic Form")
The content of individual verses can be analysed in terms of various features -- i.e. the features that are assumed to shift as we move forward in the poem. One of these is place.
Place encompasses everything from geography to the site of a specific activity -- virtually any stanza that does not show a person or a group of people. A caterpillar on a leaf, a basket of fruit in the market, a bird in the sky, and so on. Whether its locale is mentioned or not, any object may be construed as implying its setting, thus qualifying it [...] as place. -- Shokan Tadashi Kondo and William J. Higginson, "Link and Shift: A Practical Guide to Renku Composition"
More classically, Tachibana Hokushi pointed out several different levels or types of 'person', which remind me of Ruesch's divisions:
- ji - self, first person experience
- ta - other, the experience of another person
- ji-ta-han - self and other, the experience of oneself with another or others
- ashirai - public or mixed, the experience of a group of people, even if indistinctly drawn
- ba - place, an event or scene without human involvement, thoug hartefacts may be included
The links themselves can be divided into different layers: 'word' or 'object' links are the most basic. 'Content' and 'meaning' links are more subtle. The most subtle is something called 'scent links' or nioizuke links, which "evokes a much more tenuous set of associations which are nowhere specified in the text itself." This as a specific interesting effect: "The reader is obligated to engage with the poem as an active interpreter."
That -- interestingly enough -- is what McLuhan is talking about vis à vis "Hot" media [I think...].
Pierre-Luc Vaudry and Guy Lapalme
Assembling Narratives with Associative Threads
This paper sort of went over my head. They referred to Zwann 1995 on different kinds of links between texts, like causality. That sounded interesting.
Kaori Kumagai, Ichiro Kobayashi, Daichi Mochihashi, Hideki Asoh, Tomoaki Nakamura and Takayuki Nagai
Human-like Natural Language Generation Using Monte Carlo Tree Search
This paper is about using a technique similar to the technique used in computer board game playing to generate sentences. A challenge to this approach is that board games have win-lose propositions, whereas evaluating generated sentences isn't so obvious. The approach the authors use here seems to favour 'typicality' of generated sentences and co-occurring words. What seems to be missing is a context-specific evaluation (e.g. typicality when confronted with such and such a situation, which is closer to the game-playing model). Questions point out difficulty with sentences like "the bread eats the dog" or similar ambiguity between "love ?? man ?? woman".
Pablo Gervás
Empirical Determination of Basic Heuristics for Narrative Content Planning
Distinction between "what is told" and "how it is told" is a typical Saussurean split. "Focalization" (a term from Genette) tells the story from the point of view of a given character -- here cf. Sloterdijk and the notion of 'phatic architecture'.
Something also to with object persistence -- characters don't stop existing when they aren't "in the frame." (But what about something like Amores Perros, in which there are several entangled stories? -- so-called Hyperlink cinema.)
As described by Edward Soja and Costis Hadjimichalis spatial analysis examines the "'horizontal experience' of human life, the spatial dimension of individual behavior and social relations, as opposed to the 'vertical experience' of history, tradition, and biography." -WP
(Full set of slides {here}.)
Satoshi Sato
A Challenge to the Third Hoshi Shinichi Award
Hoshi Shinichi was one of the big 3 Japanese short story writers. His favorite characters were non-human (e.g. robots, aliens). Plots are hand-programmed as part of the grammar. Grammar generation is hard.
Louisa Pragst, Juliana Miehle, Stefan Ultes and Wolfgang Minker
Automatic Modification of Communication Style In Dialogue Management
'Verbosity' and 'directness' can be varied. ("Many people take an asprin when they have a headache.") Verbosity is interesting as an example of and/and/and discourse. "How do we determine if this is relevant for the user?" One approach is to see whether the various anded terms always appear together in a corpus. Directness might be set up as a specific response to a user's request for information. Check e.g. if the user understood the provided information.
We can't really adapt the situation without understanding the high-level "goals" or something similar. A pipeline like this:
Language analysis -> Dialogue manager (with reference to a knowledge base) -> Language generation
also needs some sort of pragmatics behind it. E.g. in a healthcare scenario there is an obligation to help.
Eugenio Concepción, Gonzalo Mendez and Pablo Gervás
Mining Knowledge in Storytelling Systems for Narrative Generation
The talk at least contains a nice survey of computer fiction systems and the historical dimensions that storytelling systems consider. The authors are trying to come up with a common structure for representing all of this stuff. (Which reminds me of D. Winterstein's effort to build a common structure for representing different kinds of poetry, or the interesting regular expression based structuring in the new clojure.spec library...)
Writing itself is referred to a writing and revision cycle that could explore the different facets of structure. I'm reminded of Hjelmslev's theory (he talks about structure and process -- and also seems to offer a reminder that just representing structure isn't going to fly).
Stephen McGregor, Matthew Purver and Geraint Wiggins
Process Based Evaluation of Computer Generated Poetry
How do people think about computer poetry? We thought that people would be very sensitive to procedural descriptions, but at least at this point in history, they aren't. "We should be suspicious of mystically inspired computers."
Process Based Evaluation of Computer Generated Poetry
How do people think about computer poetry? We thought that people would be very sensitive to procedural descriptions, but at least at this point in history, they aren't. "We should be suspicious of mystically inspired computers."
Creative: reaction to the context. Context also shows up by analysing e.g. "flowers" and "romance" and taking the dimensions that are high for both. (Does this just correspond to picking the words that co-occur with both?) You can impose a topology/topography (how?).
A first-person narration by the computer as "I" obscures the computational process. How about presenting the computer in a more straightforward way?
... But, I think the discussion of how the poem was made was just not that interesting, and similarly, the poem itself was not very interesting.
Q. Why is it SO bad?
A. Perhaps because we're presenting such an odd collection of words. However, mixing up different themes could be a good thing, if the computer wants to combine the themes. E.g. "Love is like a breadbox" could be interesting if there was a good explanation for it.
Q. But how DO people assess poetry? ...
Alessandro Mazzei and Andrea Valle
Combinatorics vs Grammar: archeology of computational poetry in Tape Mark I
Combinatorics vs Grammar: archeology of computational poetry in Tape Mark I
Andrea Valle is a semiotician. This talk seems pretty exciting. Task: you have to understand the data structures and algorithms inside a system that was written by an artist. The artistic community of the time knew Balestrini's work.
"How did the available technology constrain and shape the work of the poet?"
"What is the relation between the poet and the machine in the creative process?"
the divine fury of the poet ... is converted into the infinie technical possibilities of the electronic instrument, elected both as the imaginative stimulus and as the practical manufacturer. - Sanguineti, 1965
poetry is an operation, the poet shows, precisely, how to act - Brancaleoni, 2007
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