1. Rachelle Annechino
Master’s student at the School of Information
Background:
Ethnographic research
English major
Used to design databases mostly for
banks (‘cause I was an English major)
2. Things I like:
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (www.yhchang.com)
Poems
Any movie by Hayao Miyazaki, and Edward Scissorhands
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
Life history narratives
Wire sculpture by Ruth Asawa
Drawings by Henry Darger, Maira Kalman
And:
Using NLP for creative purposes
4. Monologue for an Onion
by Suji Kwock Kim
I don't mean to make you cry.
I mean nothing, but this has not kept you
From peeling away my body, layer by layer,
The tears clouding your eyes as the table fills
With husks, cut flesh, all the debris of pursuit.
Poor deluded human: you seek my heart.
Hunt all you want. Beneath each skin of mine
Lies another skin: I am pure onion--pure union
Of outside and in, surface and secret core.
Look at you, chopping and weeping. Idiot.
Is this the way you go through life, your mind
A stopless knife, driven by your fantasy of truth,
Of lasting union--slashing away skin after skin
From things, ruin and tears your only signs
Of progress? Enough is enough.
You must not grieve that the world is glimpsed
Through veils. How else can it be seen?
How will you rip away the veil of the eye, the veil
That you are, you who want to grasp the heart
Of things, hungry to know where meaning
Lies. Taste what you hold in your hands: onion-juice,
Yellow peels, my stinging shreds. You are the one
In pieces. Whatever you meant to love, in meaning to
You changed yourself: you are not who you are,
Your soul cut moment to moment by a blade
Of fresh desire, the ground sown with abandoned skins.
And at your inmost circle, what? A core that is
Not one. Poor fool, you are divided at the heart,
Lost in its maze of chambers, blood, and love,
A heart that will one day beat you to death.
5. Are you sure you don’t mean to make me cry?
I don't mean to make you cry
This has not kept you from treasure letterpress
My body layer by layer the tears
Eyes as the table fills
Flesh all the debris of pursuit, poor shone
You seek my heart, hunt hip anemone
Want beneath each skin of mine ode
I am pure onion
In surface and secret core, look mer
Chopping and weeping idiot, is this coy infer
You go through life your mind a stopless knife psalm
Your fantasy of truth of designed psalm
Away skin after skin from things ruin treat
Your semiagricultural
*Trigrams + noun replacement. Similar to what The Cut ‘n’ Mix Word Machine produces,
but a bit more “grammatical”
6. Generating well-formed, creative language
• She skipped to the store.
• She walked to the health.
• She thought to the store.
• She daisied through the field.
Some linguistic innovations seem creative, while others just seem off.
“Many systems have already been developed which generate natural language, but most of
them invariably produce well known sentences based on rigid templates or other strict
rules that make them repeat themselves with little variance.”
(Mendes, 2007)
7. Shuffling and re-combining set phrases works great if you
are modeling repetitive, obfuscatory prose
>>> from nltk.misc import chomsky
>>> chomsky.generate_chomsky()
Let us continue to suppose that the theory of syntactic features developed earlier
delimits the system of base rules exclusive of the lexicon. Thus an important
property of these three types of EC is rather different from the requirement that
branching is not tolerated within the dominance scope of a complex symbol. Note
that any associated supporting element may remedy and, at the same time,
eliminate nondistinctness in the sense of distinctive feature theory. Suppose, for
instance, that relational information is not quite equivalent to the traditional
practice of grammarians. From C1, it follows that the descriptive power of the
base component appears to correlate rather closely with a stipulation to place the
constructions into these various categories.
8. But it seems less productive for poetry
You must not grieve that the world is glimpsed Through veils.
Whatever you meant to love, in meaning to You changed yourself: you are divided at
the heart, Lost in its maze of chambers, blood, and love, A heart that will one day
beat you to death.
Whatever you meant to love, in meaning to You changed yourself: you are divided at
the heart, Lost in its maze of chambers, blood, and love, A heart that will one day
beat you to death.
Is this the way you go through life, your mind A stopless knife, driven by your fantasy
of truth, Of lasting union--slashing away skin after skin From things, ruin and tears
your only signs Of progress?
You must not grieve that the world is glimpsed Through veils.
Is this the way you go through life, your mind A stopless knife, driven by your fantasy
of truth, Of lasting union--slashing away skin after skin From things, ruin and tears
your only signs Of progress?
9. A healthful state of association
“For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: but though this be
true, Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety
of subjects but by a man, who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility,
had also thought long and deeply. … We shall describe objects, and utter sentiments,
of such a nature and in such connection with each other, that the understanding of the
being to whom we address ourselves, if he be in a healthful state of association, must
necessarily be in some degree enlightened, and his affections ameliorated. “
(William Wordsworth)
10. Wordnet
“Traditional lexical knowledge bases such as Word-Net formalize a limited set of
systematic relations that exist between words, such as synonymy, polysemy,
hypernymy. When such relations are composed, they maintain their systematicity,
and do not create surprising, unexpected word associations. The human mind is
not limited to such systematic relations, and people tend to associate words to
each other with a rich set of relations… In linguistic creativity, such as prose or
poetry writing, word associations play an important role and the ability to
connect words into new, unexpected relations is one of the key mechanisms that
triggers the reader involvement”
(Netzer, Gabay, Goldberg and Elhadad, 2009)
11. Lexical relations
The (only) hypernym of “rose.n.01” is “shrub.”
The hyponyms of “rose.n.01” are a whole bunch of kinds of roses: “dog rose,”
“musk rose”, “tea rose.”
12. More lexical relations
Hyponyms of hypernyms of “rose” include “honey flower,” “lotus tree,” and
“wild peach.” These words are on roughly the same categorical level as “rose” --
not too broad or too specific – and while they are similar to “rose,” they are not
precisely synonymous.
13. Weird. (But interesting?)
Enough is enough.
You must not grieve that the leaf is glimpsed
through products.
How else can it be seen?
How will you rip away the product that you are,
you who want to grasp the intersection of
contradiction,
hungry to know where meaning lies.
What you hold in your pressings:
onion-juice,
yellow schnooks.
You are the one in fractions.
Whatever you meant to love,
in interpolation to you changed yourself.
Whatever you meant to love,
in promotional material to you changed
yourself:
You are not who you are,
cut quadruplet to quartet by a leaf of fresh
affect,
sown with abandoned exuviaes.
And at your inmost square,
what?
A Cartesian product that is not one.
*Trigram Markov chain with weighted noun hypernym/hyponyms
14. How could a poetry remixer be made more
interactive?
Can NLP techniques produce creative works?
How “realistic” does NLP have to be to be used
for creative purposes?
