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A Service-Oriented Architecture for Computational Creativity
Abstract
Creativity is a long cherished and widely studied aspect of human behavior that allows us to re-invent the familiar, and to imagine the new. Computational creativity (CC) is a newly burgeoning area of creativity research that brings together academics and practitioners from diverse disciplines, genres and modalities, to explore the potential of computers to be autonomously creative, or to collaborate as co-creators with people. We describe here an architecture for creative Web services that will act as a force magnifier for CC, both for academic research, and for the effective deployment of real CC applications in industry. For researchers, this service-oriented architecture supports the pooling of technologies in a robust interoperable framework, in which CC models are conceived, developed and migrated from lab settings to an industrial strength platform. Industry developers, for their part, will be able to exploit novel results of CC research in a robust, low-risk form, without having to re-implement algorithms from a quickly moving field. We illustrate the architecture with the first of a growing set of creative Web services that provide robust figurative language processing on demand.
... Automatic story generation is a part of a wider research area in Artificial Intelligence named Computational Creativity (CC), which aims to develop a creative behaviour in machines [26]. A story generator algorithm (SGA) refers to a computational procedure resulting in an artefact that can be considered a story [8]. ...
... In a wider context, still within the computational creativity area, it is also noteworthy the architecture proposed by Veale [26] for creative Web services. This model tried to combine both the academic and the industry needs in a solution for enhancing computational creativity systems. ...
... The idea behind the development of a collaborative environment for co-creating stories is pretty close to a practice referred by Veale [26] when he spoke of how organizations outsource their creative needs to external agencies. Such agencies act as option providers, in the sense that they create a universe of potential solutions, but leave others to make the final decision. ...
The basic idea behind this paper is the development of a collaborative environment for generating stories. Hence, the authors put forward an architectural model for knowledge interchange between story generation systems, namely Propper, STella and Charade, in the interest of enhancing the interoperability and fostering the co-creation process. For this reason, this paper proposes an API Economy model based on the interchange of knowledge and services between story generation systems. The proposed architecture is based on an API-based microservices ecosystem connected according the REST architectural model. This approach aims at starting with a reduced set of services for extending it later with new capabilities.
... In addition to the possible articulation of the poetry generation task in terms of its constituent element, one needs to consider the way in which these systems-and others designed for similar or related tasks-are themselves articulated into modules that cooperate. Veale (2013b) proposes an architecture for creative Web services intended to act as a force magnifier for computational creativity, both for academic research and for the effective deployment of real computational creativity applications in industry. The architecture combines three types of services: discovery and insight services, aimed at mining diverse corpora to acquire emergent insights and novel perspectives on everyday concepts; idea composition services, designed to suggest, elaborate, and comprehend conceptual metaphors, analogies, and blends, as well as services for accessing the large store of commonsense knowledge that these composition services will crucially rely upon; and framing services, which can package the conceptual conceit that underpins a creative act for an audience in a concise, easily appreciable, and memorable form, such as a linguistic metaphor, simile, joke, name, slogan, short story, poem, picture, piece of music, or a mixture of these forms. ...
... A large number of the systems reviewed rely on knowledge bases that provide them with answers to particular queries. These queries may concern semantic relations between words (Gonçalo Oliveira 2012;Toivanen et al. 2014), rhetorical pairings Veale 2013b), semantics to syntax mappings (Manurung 1999(Manurung , 2003, or emotional connotation of particular words Charnley et al. 2014;Misztal and Indurkhya 2014). These type of knowledge bases would be very useful if available as services. ...
... Solutions already exist out there that can be seen as partial answers to this need. Existing Web services for creativity, such as Thesaurus Rex or Metaphor Magnet (Veale 2013b), would actually fit into this description. ...
The article explores the potential of redefining as services a number of functionalities involved in poetry generation systems to better serve the challenge of working toward a yet unknown successful computational model of the creative task being addressed. This is performed by considering how some of the processes currently modeled in existing systems for poetry generation might be deconstructed into a set of services susceptible of being recombined in different ways to be integrated in other developments. Building on prior attempts to propose an evolutionary architecture that allows integration of a number of artificial intelligence technologies in combination, this article explores the advantages of service-oriented architecture for reimplementing as publicly available services some selected functionality of the Wishful Automatic Spanish Poet (WASP) poetry generation system.
... In recent years, with the advancement of artificial intelligence, the term 'computational creativity' or mechanical creativity has been used (e.g. Veale, 2013). However, such models are designed and based on the level of human creativity. ...
... It is an approach that makes a virtue of starting over, of failing fast and of failing better, because in conditions like ours it is more costly to fix a broken, highly-constrained episode than to make a fresh start from the last known good episode. Moreover, it facilitates a just-in-time view of the story-generation process that is ideally suited to the implementation of that process as a creative web service (see e.g., (Veale 2013) and (Concepción, Gervás, and Méndez 2017)). ...
Struggling writers are sometimes tempted to throw away their current effort and start over with a a blank page and a fresh approach. But the cost of yielding to this temptation is high, especially when one has already sunk a great deal of time and energy into a work that must be discarded. However, as computational creativity increases the speed and lowers the cost of narrative generation, the option of a fresh do-over becomes ever more attractive. So we consider here a simulation-based approach to the generation of episodic stories in which stories are generated, evaluated and frequently discarded in a rapid, coarse-grained cycle of engagement and reflection. The goal of simulation is to better exploit the situated possibilities for information transfer amongst the characters in a story, while the goal of repeated simulation is to find the story that achieves maximal coherence amongst its episodic parts.
... The work presented in this paper builds upon the foundations of a system called Thesaurus Rex (Veale 2013). In the same way as Thesaurus Rex links nouns to properties, our approach will link both characters and categories to adjectival properties. ...
Many linguistic creativity applications rely heavily on knowledge of nouns and their properties. However, such knowledge sources are scarce and limited. We present a graph-based approach for expanding and weighting properties of nouns with given initial, non-weighted properties. In this paper, we focus on famous characters, either real or fictional, and categories of people , such as Actor, Hero, Child etc. In our case study, we started with an average of 11 and 25 initial properties for characters and categories, for which the method found 63 and 132 additional properties, respectively. An empirical evaluation shows that the expanded properties and weights are consistent with human judgement. The resulting knowledge base can be utilized in creation of figurative language. For instance, metaphors based on famous characters can be used in various applications including story generation, creative writing, advertising and comic generation.
... The practice review confirms that the current design paradigm, realised and evolved by the innovative firms, differs from the conventional design workflows, which are continuously followed by most architecture schools (Bunchanan 2012), in the way that computational design tools are intensively implemented in morphological exploration (Ismail 2001;Veale 2013). Such design strategies facilitate handling the interdisciplinary aspects of geometry configuration, structural analysis, and environmental design considerations for parametric and generative form-finding (Abdullah and Kamara 2013; Agkathidis 2015), performance-based parametric design and simulations (Oxman 2008a(Oxman , 2009), automated design optimisation (Malkawi 1994;Gerber and Lin 2014), and responsive design strategies (Meagher 2015) within the paradigm of digital architecture (Oxman 2008b). ...
Leading architectural firms in professional practice are expanding their range of design possibilities using digital design strategies. A digital design strategy enables architects to make informed decisions and better handle the interdisciplinary nature of the discipline, while dealing with various complexities, uncertainties and an infinite number of the potential solutions. One of the main responsibilities of architectural education is to educate students on the breadth of professional opportunities and career paths. Therefore, it is highly important to examine the sufficiency of available digital design courses in the architectural education curriculum. To achieve this, the study examines the curriculum of two architectural programs in the Middle East and compares the findings with award-winning architectural firms in international professional practice from a digital design perspective. In the first step, various cutting-edge technology-driven firms were investigated, then three award-winning firms were subsequently selected and studied using a deliberate review. Secondly, the curriculum of each architecture school was reviewed and the responsible instructors were interviewed through a qualitative method of in-depth interviews; the perceptions and suggestions of eight academic staff members from both schools (four each) were recorded to facilitate an assessment of the status of the integrated digital design methodologies in the architecture education of the intended schools. The findings indicate that the current structures of architecture education curricula cannot match the innovative challenges and social demands of architecture in the digital age. The importance of curriculum review, as well as different incorporation alternatives of the digital design applications, are also suggested.
... Consequently, the generated narratives naturally fit into the bigger picture. Yet, we consider this an interesting challenge to inspire further developments in the domain, in particular for modular, service-based systems (León, 2011;Veale, 2013;Gervás, 2017) capable of generating narratives from exchangeable story worlds. In the Chronicle Competition, generators are evaluated on different maps, based on settlements with arbitrary complexity. ...
We introduce the Chronicle Challenge as an optional addition to the Settlement Generation Challenge in Minecraft. One of the foci of the overall competition is adaptive procedural content generation (PCG), an arguably under-explored problem in computational creativity. In the base challenge, participants must generate new settlements that respond to and ideally interact with existing content in the world, such as the landscape or climate. The goal is to understand the underlying creative process, and to design better PCG systems. The Chronicle Challenge in particular focuses on the generation of a narrative based on the history of a generated settlement, expressed in natural language. We discuss the unique features of the Chronicle Challenge in comparison to other competitions, clarify the characteristics of a chronicle eligible for submission and describe the evaluation criteria. We furthermore draw on simulation-based approaches in computational storytelling as examples to how this challenge could be approached.
... Veale [20] campaigns in favour of a future for Computational Creativity as a connected network of creative web services. He argues that such a service-oriented architecture would allow researchers to pool creative technologies in a robust interoperable framework, and industry developers to exploit novel results of CC research in a robust, low-risk form, without having to re-implement algorithms from a quickly moving field. ...
Looking into the future is like standing where the road has led you in a fog and trying to imagine where that same road might lead on from there. One may guess based on several things: where one wanted to go in the first place, where roads that traversed a similar landscape have led, and where other people heading down the same road think they are headed. I explore these possibilities for computational creativity, based on 15 years of experience travelling down that particular road.
... Creative Information Retrieval (CIR) can be used as a platform for the design of many Web services that offer linguistic creativity on demand. By enabling the flexible retrieval of ngram data for non-literal queries, CIR allows a wide variety of creative tasks to be reimagined as simple IR tasks (Veale 2013). In the next section we show how CIR facilitates the generation of creative similes from linguistic readymades. ...
Metaphor is much more than a pyrotechnical flourish of language or a fascinating conceptual puzzle: it is a cognitive lever that allows speakers to leverage their knowledge of one domain to describe, reframe and understand another. Though NLP researchers tend to view metaphor as a problem to be solved, metaphor is perhaps more fittingly seen as a solution to be used, that is, as an important tool in the support of creative thinking and the generation of diverse linguistic outputs. Since it pays to think of metaphor as a foundational cognitive service, one that can be exploited in a wide array of creative computational tasks, we present here a view of metaphor as a public Web service that can be freely called on demand.
... Cardoso et al. (2009) defined computational creativity (CC); which is an element of creativity strategy; as an emerging field that studies the potential of computers to be more than feature-rich tools, and to be autonomous creators and co-creators in their own right. According to Veale (2013), a comprehensive service-oriented architecture (SOA) for CC is a SOA with many diverse and competing services, operating at different levels of specificity and scale. More precisely, this SOA supports the pooling of technologies in a robust interoperable framework. ...
Most of ongoing research directions on wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) are discussed as an energy problem. In this paper, we see WMSNs as a service-oriented planning issue. Our aim is to demonstrate the value of a planning phase supported by service-oriented design for multimedia monitoring based on WMSNs. The main problem we address in this paper is how to reduce the problems related to the deployment of the monitoring application during the pre-deployment phase. We present a new planning tool called monitoring service using a wireless multimedia sensor network (MSWMSN) that allows users to size up and plan WMSN monitoring scenarios under service level agreements (SLAs) during the pre-deployment phase. With our tool, we can load the surveillance area, generate several test scenarios by putting the required parameters (e.g., positioning, processing, routing, MAC), perform and classify the generated scenarios using a combined subjective-objective evaluation and finally, choose the best scenario for deployment.
... Computational creativity covers a diverse range of tasks. It has been argued that web services are beneficial to the CC community (Veale, 2013). Different researchers can work on different tasks and share their results without having to reinvent algorithms from published pseudo code, deal with myriad installation instructions or adopt new programming languages. ...
The invention of fictional ideas is often a central process in the creative production of artefacts such as poems, music, paintings and games. Currently, fictional ideation is being studied by the Computational Creativity community within the WHIM European project. The aim of WHIM is to develop the What-If Machine, a software system capable of inventing, evaluating and presenting fictional ideas with cultural value. In this paper we explore the potential applications of the What-If Machine in the context of games. Specifically, we propose ways in which the What-If Machine can be used as an assistant for the design of games, by providing ideas about characters, the environment, etc., as well as a creative system during gameplay, through interesting interactions with the player.
This collection contains a selection of recent work on people’s production of figurative language (metaphoric, ironic, metonymic, hyperbolic, ...) and similarly of figurative expression in visual media and artefact design. The articles illuminate issues such as why and under what circumstances people produce figurative expression and how it is moulded by their aims. By focusing on production, the intention is to help stimulate more academic research on it and redress historically lower levels of published work on generation than on understanding of figurative expression. The contributions stretch across various academic disciplines—mainly psychology, cognitive linguistics and applied linguistics, but with a representation also of philosophy and artificial intelligence—and across different types of endeavour—theoretical investigation and model building, experimental studies, and applications focussed work (for instance, figurative expression in product design and online support groups). There is also a wide-ranging introductory chapter that touches on areas outside the scope of the contributed articles and discusses difficult issues such as a complex interplay of production and understanding.
An automated storytelling system that presents its stories as text on a screen is limited in its engagement with readers. An embodied robotic agent can overcome these limitations by using gesture to physically enact its stories. This paper presents a robotic agent that enacts its own novel stories, which it shapes from the feedback it obtains using probing personal questions. Our robotic writer/presenter has two alternate modes of story-generation: a straight "telling" mode and an interview-oriented back-and-forth that extracts personal experiences from the user as raw material for new stories. We explore the practical issues of implementing both modes on a NAO humanoid robot that integrates gestural capabilities in an existing story-telling system.
Our experience of past problems can offer valuable insights into the solution of current problems, though since novel problems are not merely re-occurrences of those we have seen before, their solutions require us to integrate multiple sources of inspiration into a single, composite whole. The degree to which the seams of these patchwork solutions are evident to an end-user offers an inverse measure of the practical success of the reuse process: the less visible its joins, the more natural a solution is likely to seem. However, since creativity is neither an objective nor an intrinsic property of a solution, but a subjective label ascribed by a community, the more perceptible the tensions between parts, and the more evident the wit that one must employ to ameliorate these tensions, then the more likely we are to label a solution as creative. We explore here the conceit that creative reuse is more than practical problem-solving: it is reuse that draws attention to itself, by reveling in boundary friction.
The literary imagination may take flight on the wings of metaphor, but hard-headed scientists are just as likely as doe-eyed poets to reach for a metaphor when the descriptive need arises. Metaphor is a pervasive aspect of every genre of text and every register of speech, and is as useful for describing the inner workings of a "black hole" (itself a metaphor) as it is the affairs of the human heart. The ubiquity of metaphor in natural language thus poses a significant challenge for Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems and their builders, who cannot afford to wait until the problems of literal language have been solved before turning their attention to figurative phenomena. This book offers a comprehensive approach to the computational treatment of metaphor and its figurative brethren—including simile, analogy, and conceptual blending—that does not shy away from their important cognitive and philosophical dimensions. Veale, Shutova, and Beigman Klebanov approach metaphor from multiple computa...
As services are becoming more complicated, service providers face with tremendous difficulties in developing their services. In this environment, a lot of component functions are provided by multiple service providers, and the providers also desire to reduce costs for providing their services. A context-aware service overlay network (CSON) is a promising architecture to meet those demands by dynamically composing service paths and reconfiguring them based on various contexts. This paper proposes a service path selection and adaptation algorithm that assures quality of services (QoS) and balances the loads at the same time. The algorithm also dynamically adapts to an optimal service path when it detects a large amount of unexpected service loads over the service path. Since our algorithm is to solve a variation of multiconstrained path selection problem, which is known to be NP-complete, we formulate the problem using ant colony optimisation algorithm.
Divergence is a multifaceted capability of multifaceted creative individuals. It may be exhibited to different degrees, and along different dimensions, from one individual to another. The same may be true of computational creative agents: Such systems may do more than exhibit differing levels of divergence: They may also implement the mechanics of divergence in very different ways. We argue that creative capabilities such as divergence are best viewed as cognitive services that may be called upon by cognitive agents to complete tasks in ways that may be deemed “original” or to generate products that may be deemed “creative.” We further argue that in a computational embodiment of such an agent, cognitive services are best realized as modular, distributed Web services which hide the complexities of their particular implementations and which can be discovered, reused and composed as desired by other Web-aware systems with diverse creative needs of their own. We describe the workings of one such reusable service for generating divergent categorizations on demand and show how this service can be composed with others to support the generation and rendering of novel metaphors in an autonomous Twitterbot system.
Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1979), pp. 325-335
The purpose of my essay is to characterize the structure, semantics, and rhetoric of the poetic simile (PS). In order to do this, I will first propose a model of the non-poetic simile (NPS) and then describe the PS as a complex cluster of deviations from the NPS model. The NPS model consists of various norms or rules that govern the production and reception of NPSS, applying to different levels of the text: formal rules (e.g., the tenor should precede the vehicle), structural rules (e.g., the tenor, vehicle, marker, and ground should be explicit), and semantic rules (e.g., the ground on which the simile focuses is a salient feature of the chosen vehicle). The PS is thus described as a cluster of deviations consisting of a deviation from one semantic NPS principle, usually accompanied by a deviation from one or two other (formal, structural, or semantic) NPS norms. I also argue that successful PSS are characterized by a tensional balance between observing certain principles of the NPS and violating others. Finally, I indicate two major patterns of many successful PSS. In these two major patterns, the relative place of the recognizable elements, as against the novel elements, shifts.
Just as observing is more than just seeing, comparing is far more than mere matching. It takes understanding, and even inventive-ness, to discern a useful basis for judging two ideas as similar in a particular context, especially when our perspective is shaped by an act of linguistic creativity such as metaphor, simile or analogy. Structured re-sources such as WordNet offer a conven-ient hierarchical means for converging on a common ground for comparison, but offer little support for the divergent thinking that is needed to creatively view one concept as another. We describe such a means here, by showing how the web can be used to har-vest many divergent views for many famil-iar ideas. These lateral views complement the narrow vertical view offered by Word-Net, and support a system for creative idea exploration called Thesaurus Rex. We also show how Thesaurus Rex supports a novel, generative similarity measure for WordNet.
Computational modeling is a cornerstone of cognitive science. As such, computational feasibility is an important element of any linguistic theory which claims cognitive plausibility. This article considers the computational feasibility of the conceptual integration theory of Fauconnier and Turner, and by tying together established work on the computational properties of semantic networks, analogical reasoning and metaphor comprehension, concludes that conceptual integration is indeed a computational the sound theory. One particular computational model, named Sapper, is described in detail, and the information processing requirements of this model are used to argue for some computationally motivated extensions to the established perspective on integration.
Considers the definition and assessment of creativity and presents a componential framework for conceptualizing this faculty. Including domain-relevant skills, creativity-relevant skills, and task motivation as a set of necessary and sufficient components of creativity, the framework describes the way in which cognitive abilities, personality characteristics, and social factors might contribute to stages of the creative process. The discussion emphasizes the previously neglected social factors and highlights the contributions that a social psychology of creativity can make to a comprehensive view of creative performance. (99 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Examples of figurative language can range from the explicit and the obvious to the implicit and downright enigmatic. Some simpler forms, like simile, often wear their meanings on their sleeve, while more challeng- ing forms, like metaphor, can make cryptic allusions more akin to those of riddles or crossword puzzles. In this paper we argue that because the same concepts and properties are described in either case, a computational agent can learn from the easy cases (explicit similes) how to comprehend and generate the hard cases (non- explicit metaphors). We demonstrate that the marked- ness of similes allows for a large case-base of illustra- tive examples to be easily acquired from the web, and present a system, called Sardonicus, that uses this case- base both to understand property-attribution metaphors and to generate apt metaphors for a given target on de- mand. In each case, we show how the text of the web is used as a source of tacit knowledge about what cate- gorizations are allowable and what properties are most contextually appropriate. Overall, we demonstrate that by using the web as a primary knowledge source, a sys- tem can achieve a robust and scalable competence with metaphor while minimizing the need for hand-crafted resources like WordNet.
Concept taxonomies offer a powerful means for organizing knowledge, but this organiza- tion must allow for many overlapping and fine-grained perspectives if a general-purpose taxonomy is to reflect concepts as they are actually employed and reasoned about in ev- eryday usage. We present here a means of bootstrapping finely-discriminating tax- onomies from a variety of different starting points, or seeds, that are acquired from three different sources: WordNet, ConceptNet and the web at large.
Information Content (IC) is an important dimension of word knowledge when assessing the similarity of two terms or word senses. The conventional way of measuring the IC of word senses is to combine knowledge of their hierarchical structure from an on- tology like WordNet with statistics on their actual usage in text as derived from a large corpus. In this paper we present a wholly in- trinsic measure of IC that relies on hierarchical structure alone. We report that this measure is consequently easier to calculate, yet when used as the basis of a similarity mechanism it yields judgments that correlate more closely with human assessments than other, extrinsic measures of IC that additionally employ corpus analysis.
Irony is an effective but challenging mode of communication that allows a speaker to express viewpoints rich in sentiment
with concision, sharpness and humour. Creative irony is especially common in online documents that express subjective and
deeply-felt opinions, and thus represents a significant obstacle to the accurate analysis of sentiment in web texts. In this
paper we look at one commonly used framing device for linguistic irony—the simile—to show how even the most creative uses
of irony are often marked in ways that make them computationally feasible to detect. We conduct a very large corpus analysis
of web-harvested similes to identify the most interesting characteristics of ironic comparisons, and provide an empirical
evaluation of a new algorithm for separating ironic from non-ironic similes.
In this article, we survey the history of studies of computational creativity, following the development of the International Conference on Computational Creativity from its beginnings, a decade ago, in two parallel workshop series. We give a brief outline of key issues and a summary of the various different approaches taken by participants in the research field. The outlook is optimistic: a lot has been achieved in 10 years.
Creativity and Artificial Intelligence: A Conceptual Blending Approach takes readers into a computationally plausible model of creativity. Inspired by a thorough analysis of work on creativity from the areas of philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, cognitive linguistics and artificial intelligence, the author deals with the various processes, principles and representations that lie underneath the act of creativity. Focusing on Arthur Koestler's Bisociations, which eventually lead to Turner and Fauconnier's conceptual blending framework, the book proposes a theoretical model that considers blends and their emergent structure as a fundamental cognitive mechanism. The author thus discusses the computational implementation of several aspects of conceptual blending theory, namely composition, completion, elaboration, frames and optimality constraints. Informal descriptions and examples are supplied to provide non-computer scientists as well as non-cognitive linguists with clear insights into these ideas. Several experiments are made, and their results are discussed, with particular emphasis on the validation of the creativity and conceptual blending aspects. Written by a researcher with a background in artificial intelligence, the book is the result of several years of exploration and discussion from different theoretical perspectives. As a result, the book echoes some of the criticism made on conceptual blending and creativity in artificial intelligence, and thus proposes improvements in both areas, with the aim of being a constructive contribution to these very intriguing, yet appealing, research orientations. © 2007 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG. All rights reserved.
The subject of creativity has been neglected by psychologists. The immediate problem has two aspects. (1) How can we discover creative promise in our children and our youth, (2) How can we promote the development of creative personalities. Creative talent cannot be accounted for adequately in terms of I.Q. A new way of thinking about creativity and creative productivity is seen in the factorial conceptions of personality. By application of factor analysis a fruitful exploratory approach can be made. Carefully constructed hypotheses concerning primary abilities will lead to the use of novel types of tests. New factors will be discovered that will provide us with means to select individuals with creative personalities. The properties of primary abilities should be studied to improve educational methods and further their utilization. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Explaining Creativity is an accessible introduction to the latest scientific research on creativity. In the last 50 yearss, psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists have increasingly studied creativity, and we now know more about creativity that at any point in history. Explaining Creativity considers not only arts like painting and writing, but also science, stage performance, and business innovation. Until about a decade ago, creativity researchers tended to focus on highly valued activities like fine art painting and Nobel prize winning science. Sawyer brings this research up to date by including movies, music videos, cartoons, videogames, hypertext fiction, and computer technology. For example, this is the first book on creativity to include studies of performance and improvisation. Sawyer draws on the latest research findings to show the importance of collaboration and context in all of these creative activities. Today's science of creativity is interdisciplinary; in addition to psychological studies of creativity, Explaining Creativity includes research by anthropologists on creativity in non-Western cultures, and research by sociologists about the situations, contexts, and networks of creative activity. Explaining Creativity brings these approaches together within the sociocultural approach to creativity pioneered by Howard Becker, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Howard Gardner. The sociocultural approach moves beyond the individual to consider the social and cultural contexts of creativity, emphasizing the role of collaboration and context in the creative process.
"Aaron's Code" tells the story of the first profound connection between art and computer technology. Here is the work of Harold Cohen - the renowned abstract painter who, at the height of a celebrated career in the late 1960's, abandoned the international scene of museums and galleries and sequestered himself with the most powerful computers he could get his hands on. What emerged from his long years of solitary struggle is an elaborate computer program that makes drawings autonomously, without human intervention - an electronic apprentice and alter ego called Aaron.
We describe a corpus-based poetry generation system which uses templates to construct poems according to given con-straints on rhyme, meter, stress, sentiment, word frequency and word similarity. Moreover, the software constructs a mood for the day by analysing newspaper articles; uses this to determine both an article to base a poem on and a tem-plate for the poem; creates an aesthetic based on relevance to the article, lyricism, sentiment and flamboyancy; searches for an instantiation of the template which maximises the aes-thetic; and provides a commentary for the whole process to add value to the creative act. We describe the processes be-hind this approach, present some experimental results which helped in fine tuning, and provide some illustrative poems and commentaries. We argue that this is the first poetry system which generates examples, forms concepts, invents aesthetics and frames its work, and so can be assessed favourably with respect to the FACE model for comparing creative systems.
Since we can 'spin' words and concepts to suit our affective needs, context is a major determinant of the perceived affect of a word or concept. We view this re-profiling as a selective emphasis or de-emphasis of the qualities that underpin our shared stereotype of a concept or a word meaning, and construct our model of the affective lexicon accordingly. We show how a large body of affective stereotypes can be acquired from the web, and also show how these are used to create and interpret affective metaphors.
Humour and incongruity appear to be constant bedfellows, for at the heart of every joke one can point to some degree of absurdity, illogicality or violation of expectation. This observation has lead many theories of humour to base themselves around some notion of incongruity or opposition, most notably the semantic-script theory (or SSTH) of Raskin and the subsequent general theory (or GTVH) of Attardo and Raskin. But correlation does not imply causality (a reality used to good effect in many successful examples of humour), and one should question whether incongruity serves a causal role in the workings and appreciation of humour or merely an epiphenomenal one. It remains a key question for humour researchers as to whether listeners react to incongruities by constructing humorous interpretations, or whether they collaboratively create these incongruities as a result of opportunistically constructing humorous interpretations.
The relationship between semantic and contextual similarity is investigated for pairs of nouns that vary from high to low semantic similarity. Semantic similarity is estimated by subjective ratings; contextual similarity is estimated by the method of sorting sentential contexts. The results show an inverse linear relationship between similarity of meaning and the discriminability of contexts. This relation, is obtained for two separate corpora of sentence contexts. It is concluded that, on average, for words in the same language drawn from the same syntactic and semantic categories, the more often two words can be substituted into the same contexts the more similar in meaning they are judged to be.
I summarise and attempt to clarify some concepts presented in and arising from Margaret Boden’s (1990) descriptive hierarchy of creativity, by beginning to formalise the ideas she proposes. The aim is to move towards a model which allows detailed comparison, and hence better understanding, of systems which exhibit behaviour which would be called “creative” in humans. The work paves the way for the description of naturalistic, multi-agent creative AI systems, which create in a societal context.I demonstrate some simple reasoning about creative behaviour based on the new framework, to show how it might be useful for the analysis and study of creative systems. In particular, I identify some crucial properties of creative systems, in terms of the framework components, some of which may usefully be proven a priori of a given system.I suggest that Boden’s descriptive framework, once elaborated in detail, is more uniform and more powerful than it first appears.
We add to the discussion of how to assess the creativ- ity of programs which generate artefacts such as poems, theorems, paintings, melodies, etc. To do so, we first review some existing frameworks for assessing artefact generation programs. Then, drawing on our experience of building both a mathematical discovery system and an automated painter, we argue that it is not appro- priate to base the assessment of a system on its output alone, and that the way it produces artefacts also needs to be taken into account. We suggest a simple frame- work within which the behaviour of a program can be categorised and described which may add to the per- ception of creativity in the system.
Information retrieval (IR) and figurative language processing (FLP) could scarcely be more different in their treatment of language and meaning. IR views language as an open-ended set of mostly stable signs with which texts can be indexed and retrieved, focusing more on a text's potential relevance than its potential meaning. In contrast, FLP views language as a system of unstable signs that can be used to talk about the world in creative new ways. There is another key difference: IR is practical, scalable and robust, and in daily use by millions of casual users. FLP is neither scalable nor robust, and not yet practical enough to migrate beyond the lab. This paper thus presents a mutually beneficial hybrid of IR and FLP, one that enriches IR with new operators to enable the non-literal retrieval of creative expressions, and which also transplants FLP into a robust, scalable framework in which practical applications of linguistic creativity can be implemented.
Over recent decades there has been a growing interest in the question of whether computer programs are capable of genuinely creative activity. Although this notion can be explored as a purely philosophical debate, an alternative perspective is to consider what aspects of the behaviour of a program might be noted or measured in order to arrive at an empirically supported judgement that creativity has occurred. We sketch out, in general abstract terms, what goes on when a potentially creative program is constructed and run, and list some of the relationships (for example, between input and output) which might contribute to a decision about creativity. Specifically, we list a number of criteria which might indicate interesting properties of a program’s behaviour, from the perspective of possible creativity. We go on to review some ways in which these criteria have been applied to actual implementations, and some possible improvements to this way of assessing creativity.
Metaphor and analogy are perhaps the most challenging aspects of linguistic creativity for a conceptual representation to facilitate, since by their very nature they seek to stretch the boundaries of domain description and dynamically establish new ways of determining inter-domain similarity. By solving the vexing representational problems posed by these phenomena, we can create a more fluid concep- tual organization that is more suited to creative processing in general. Toward this end, this paper considers the problem of how a con- ceptual system structured around a central taxonomy can dynamically create new categories or types to understand creative metaphors and analogies. We demonstrate that the conventional wisdom regarding metaphor and analogy - that such processes are creative because clever word-play is indicative of an underlying mental agility and suppleness of conceptual structure - also withstands theoretical scru- tiny when considered from the perspective of current creativity research. � 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
In Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized, first published in 2003, Sternberg reviews and summarizes the best research available on human intelligence. He argues that any serious understanding of intelligence must go beyond the standard paper and pencil tests currently in use. In addition to analytical and quantitative abilities, a theory of intelligence must take account of peoples' creative abilities - their ability to go beyond given information and imagine new and exciting ways of reformulating old problems. It must also take into account peoples' ability to weigh options carefully and act prudently. Understanding one's own intellectual shortcomings, and learning how to overcome, is as important as developing one's strengths. Sternberg develops a vision of human intelligence that is far more nuanced and accurate than anything previously offered. Wisdom, Intelligence and Creativity Synthesized will be essential reading for psychologists, cognitive scientists, educators, and organizational researchers.
Freud's theory of jokes explains how they overcome the mental "censors" that make it hard for us to think "forbidden" thoughts. But his theory did not work so well for humorous nonsense as for other comical subjects. In this essay I argue that the different forms of humor can be seen as much more similar, once we recognize the importance of knowledge about knowledge and, particularly, aspects of thinking concerned with recognizing and suppressing bugs ??neffective or destructive thought processes. When seen in this light, much humor that at first seems pointless, or mysterious, becomes more understandable.
The idea is to chip a piece out of the problem of creativity by defining a creative solution to a problem relative to the functions and predicates used in posing the problem. The simplification comes from not talking about the creativity of the problem solver but only about the creativity of the solution. Definition (informal): A solution to a problem is creative if it involves concepts not present in statement of the problem and the general knowledge surrounding it. Don't identify creativity with diculty although they are usually correlated. Example: The mutilated checkerboard problem. We also consider how to express concisely the idea of a solution. Whether the expression is adequate is relative to the knowledge and ability of the person or program to which the idea is expressed.
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Full-FACE poetry generation
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