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10.6 The Keatsian Lathe: Re-Shaping the Banal
as the Poetic
Insight requires depth. To derive original insights about the topic of a poem, of a
kind an unbiased audience might consider witty or clever, a system needs more than
shallow corpus data; it needs deep knowledge of the real world. It is perhaps ironic
then that the last place one is likely to find real insight is in the riches of a structured
knowledge base. Common-sense knowledge-bases are especially lacking in insight,
since these are designed to contain knowledge that is common to all and questioned
by none. Even domain-specific knowledge-bases, rich in specialist knowledge, are
designed as repositories of axiomatic truths that will appear self-evident to their
intended audience of experts.
Insight is both a process and a product. While insight undoubtedly requires knowl-
edge, it also takes work to craft surprising insights from the unsurprising generaliza-
tions that make up the bulk of our conventional knowledge. Though mathematicians
occasionally derive surprising theorems from the application of deductive techniques
to self-evident axioms, sound reasoning over unsurprising facts will rarely yield sur-
prising conclusions. Yet witty insights are not typically the product of an entirely
sound reasoning process. Rather, such insights amuse and provoke via a combination
of over-statement, selective use of facts, a mixing of distinct knowledge types, and a
clever packaging that makes maximal use of the Keats heuristic. Indeed, as has long
been understood by humor theorists, the logic of humorous insight is deeply bound up
with the act of framing. The logical mechanism of a joke—a kind of pseudo-logical
syllogism for producing humorous effects—is responsible for framing a situation
in such a way that it gives rise to an unexpected but meaningful incongruity (see
[ 2 , 3 ]). To craft witty insights from innocuous generalities, a system must draw on
an arsenal of logical mechanisms to frame its observations of the world in appealingly
discordant ways.
Attardo and Raskin (see [ 2 , 3 ]) view the role of a logical mechanism (LM) as
the engine of a joke: each LM provides a different way of bringing together two
overlapping scripts that are mutually opposed in some pivotal way. A joke narrative
is fully compatible with one of these scripts and only partly compatible with the other,
yet it is the partial match that we, as listeners, jump to first to understand the narrative.
In a well-structured joke, we only recognize the inadequacy of this partially-apt script
when we reach the punchline, at which point we switch our focus to its unlikely
alternative. The realization that we can easily be duped by appearances, combined
with the sense of relief and understanding that this realization can bring, results in
the AHA! feeling of insight that often accompanies the HA-HA of a good joke.
LMs suited to narrative jokes tend to engineer oppositions between narrative scripts,
but for purposes of crafting witty insights in one-line poetic forms, we will view a
script as a stereotypical representation of an entity or event. Armed with an arsenal
of stereotype “ scripts ”, Stereotrope seeks to highlight the tacit opposition between
different stereotypes as they typically relate to each other, while also engineering
credible oppositions based on corpus evidence.
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