Tightening the Constraints on Form and Content for an Existing Computer Poet

Abstract

Existing systems for the automated generation of poetry often attempt to simplify the task by taking advantage of free-form poetry - to avoid the need to achieve rigorous poetic form - and poetic licence - to avoid the need of conveying a specific message at a semantic level. This is acceptable as an initial step, but once acceptable solutions have been found for the simplified version of the problem, progress can be made towards higher goals by enriching the initial problem statement. The present paper describes an attempt where an existing computer poet, originally developed to produce poems in a given form but with no specific constraints on their content, is put to the task of producing a set of poems with tighter restrictions on both form and content. Alternative generation methods are devised to overcome the difficulties, and the various insights arising from these new methods and the impact they have on the set of resulting poems are discussed in terms of their potential contribution to better poetry generation systems.