Generating Poetry from a Prose Text: Creativity versus Faithfulness (original) (raw)

ASPERA is a case based reasoning application that generates poetry versions of texts provided by the user. The cases on its case base consist of a sentence of prose (used as retrieval key) associated with a corresponding poem fragment (used as starting point for the solution). Each case includes information about how the words in the prose text are related to the words in the poetry solution. The system applies a generation process guided by metrical rules to adapt its best matching cases to the sentences in the text provided by the user. ASPERA is a refinement of an earlier system and its casebase is currently being extended. It is hoped that soon it will have enough coverage for the system to become fully operational. The issue of whether such as system should be creative (surprising the user with poems not explicitly determined by his proposal) or faithful (keeping as close as possible to the proposal given) is discussed with a view to including in the system a facility to control its behaviour in this respect.