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Chapter 12
Poetry Generation with PoeTryMe
Hugo Gonçalo Oliveira and Amílcar Cardoso
Abstract
PoeTryMe is a platform for the automatic generation of poetry, with a
versatile architecture that provides a high level of customisation. The user can define
features that go from the poem configuration and the line templates, to the initial
seed words that will define a generation domain, and also the generation strategy. In
this chapter, we introduce PoeTryMe's architecture and describe how we used it to
generate poetry in Portuguese, using natural language processing resources for this
language as well as patterns that denote semantic relations in human-created poetry.
After presenting the resources usedwith PoeTryMe, the problemof poetry generation
is tackled incrementally, as our decisions are explained and illustrated, step-by-
step. In the end, the objective features of the poems generated by the implemented
strategies are compared, while the best-scoring poems are shown.
12.1 Introduction
Natural language generation [
30
] is a sub-field of artificial intelligence and computa-
tional linguistics, which aims at developing computer programs capable of producing
text that is understood by humans. Biographies [
20
] and weather forecasts [
3
]are
some of the text genres that have been generated automatically. Although with sin-
gular features, the generation of text that can be seen as creative, such as story
narratives [
5
], jokes [
31
] or poetry [
11
,
24
], also fits in this sub-field.
In this chapter, we address the automatic generation of poetry, by presenting
PoeTryMe, a generic platform designed for this task. Given a generation grammar
and a set of relation instances, PoeTryMe generates grammatically correct and mean-
ingful sentences. Those may then be combined according to a pre-defined strategy,
towards the production of a poem, with certain features. PoeTryMe has a versatile
architecture that provides a high level of customisation and can be the starting point
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