Henry Thompson’s scientific contributions

: 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...