Graeme Ritchie’s research while affiliated with University of Edinburgh and other places

Recently, many programs have been written to perform tasks which are usually regarded as requiring creativity in humans.

In exploring the question of whether a computer program is behaving creatively, it is important to be explicit, and if possible formal, about the criteria that are being applied in making judgements of creativity. We propose a formal (and rather simplified) outline of the relevant attributes of a potentially creative program. Based on this, we posit a number of formal criteria that could be applied to rate the extent to which the program has behaved creatively. A guiding principle is that the question of what computational mechanisms might lead to creative behaviour is open and empirical, and hence we should clearly distinguish between judgements about creative achievements and theoretical proposals about potentially creative mechanisms. The intention is to focus, clarify and make more concrete the debate about creative programs. 1 Introduction The goal of this paper is to set out some of the issues relevant to assessing whether a particular computer program has been, or is be...

Humour is a valid subject for research in artificial intelligence, as it is one of the more complex of human behaviours. Although philosophers and others have discussed humour for centuries, it is only very recently that computational work has begun in this field, so the state of the art is still rather basic. Much of the research has concentrated on humour expressed verbally, and there has been some emphasis on models based on "incongruity". Actual implementations have involved puns of very limited forms. It is not clear that computerised jokes could enhance user interfaces in the near future, but there is a role for computer modelling in testing symbolic accounts of the structure of humorous texts. A major problem is the need for a humour-processing program to have knowledge of the world, and reasoning abilities.

: In this paper we describe a flexible approach to natural language generation that employs a stochastic hillclimbing search algorithm and an integrated architecture. We then discuss the benefits of this approach over existing, informative, goal-driven generation systems. We choose the generation of poetry as our research task domain, as it is a prime example of natural language that demands the degree of flexibility provided by our approach. Finally, we report and discuss results of our preliminary implementation work. Keywords : NLG architectures, stochastic search, creativity, poetry generation Copyright c # 2000 by The University of Edinburgh. All Rights Reserved The authors and the University of Edinburgh retain the right to reproduce and publish this paper for non-commercial purposes. Permission is granted for this report to be reproduced by others for non-commercial purposes as long as this copyright notice is reprinted in full in any reproduction. Applications to mak...

In this paper we describe the difficulties of poetry generation, particularly in contrast to traditional informative natural language generation. We then point out deficiencies of previous attempts at poetry generation, and propose a stochastic hillclimbing search model which addresses these deficiencies. We present both conceptual and implemented details of the most important aspects of such a model, the evaluation and evolution functions. Finally, we report and discuss results of our preliminary implementation work. 1 Motivation Poetry is a unique artifact of human natural language production, with the distinctive feature of having a strong unity between its content and its form. The creation of poetry is a task that requires intelligence, expert mastery over world and linguistic knowledge, and creativity. Although some research work has been devoted towards creative language such as story generation, poetry writing has not been afforded the same attention. It is the aim of thi...

In pursuit of the long-term goal of developing a general theory of humour, it is reasonable to study certain limited forms of humorous artefact in detail. One obvious class of humour to consider is verbally expressed humour, and in particular jokes. We propose a methodology for exploring this subarea. The central idea is to devise detailed symbolic descriptions of the internal linguistic structure of classes of jokes, at a suitable level of abstraction. These descriptions are intended to make explicit the semantic and pragmatic factors (broadly interpreted) that are relevant to the humorous effect of the subclass of joke in question, and also to contribute an accumulation of analysed data over which more general theorising may occur. An analogy is drawn with established practice in linguistics.

The idea of incongruity-resolution has frequently been suggested as an account of many types of joke. However, there is no precise statement either of this "theory" nor of its main concepts (incongruity and resolution), and different authors may disagree on details. We concentrate on two particular variants and attempt to clarify what would be needed to make these into computational models.