Alessandro Valitutti

Lexical Creativity from Word Associations

A fluent ability to associate tasks, concepts, ideas, knowledge and experiences in a relevant way is often considered an important factor of creativity, especially in problem solving. We are interested in providing computational support for discovering such creative associations. In this paper we design minimally supervised methods that can perform well in the remote associates test (RAT), a well-known psychometric measure of creativity. We show that with a large corpus of text and some relatively simple principles, this can be achieved. We then develop methods for a more general word association model that could be used in lexical creativity support systems, and which also could be a small step towards lexical creativity in computers.

Twitter: The Best of Bot Worlds for Automated Wit

Language affords a great many opportunities for the intelligent reuse of linguistic content. Rather than always putting our own thoughts into our own words, we often convey feelings through the words of others, by citing, quoting, mimicking, borrowing, varying or ironically echoing what others have already said. Social networking platforms such as Twitter elevate linguistic reuse into an integral norm of digital interaction. On such platforms, who you follow and what you re-tweet can say as much about you as the clothes you wear or the art you hang on your walls. But not everyone that is worth following is human, and not everything that is worth re-tweeting was first coined by a real person. More and more of the witty and thought-provoking content on Twitter is generated by bots, artificial systems that write their own material and vie for our attention just as humans do. Real people knowingly follow artificial bots for reasons that are subtle and diverse, but a significant reason is surely Twitter itself. This paper explores Twitter as a smart environment for automated wit, and describes the mechanics of a wittily inventive new Twitterbot named @MetaphorMagnet.

Computational generation and dissection of lexical replacement humor

ABSTRACT We consider automated generation of humorous texts by substitution of a single word in a given short text. In this setting, several factors that potentially contribute to the funniness of texts can be integrated into a unified framework as constraints on the lexical substitution. We discuss three types of such constraints: formal constraints concerning the similarity of sounds or spellings between the original word and the substitute, semantic or connotational constraints requiring the substitute to be a taboo word, and contextual constraints concerning the position and context of the replacement. Empirical evidence from extensive user studies using real SMSs as the corpus indicates that taboo constraints are statistically very effective, and so is a constraint requiring that the substitution takes place at the end of the text even though the effect is smaller. The effects of individual constraints are largely cumulative. In addition, connotational taboo words and word position have a strong interaction.

On Creative Uses of Word Associations

The ability to associate concepts is an important factor of creativity. We investigate the power of simple word co-occurrence analysis in tasks requiring verbal creativity. We first consider the Remote Associates Test, a psychometric measure of creativity. It turns out to be very easy for computers with access to statistics from a large corpus. Next, we address generation of poetry, an act with much more complex creative aspects.We outline methods that can produce surprisingly good poems based on existing linguistic corpora but otherwise minimal amounts of knowledge about language or poetry. The success of these simple methods suggests that corpus-based approaches can be powerful tools for computational support of creativity.

Infusing Humor in Unexpected Events

In this paper, we focus on humor facilitators, a type of humorous agents meant to act as mediators between unexpected events occurring in smart environments and the human agents. More specifically, we present a case study in which fictional ideation and narrative dramatization are combined to achieve humor facilitation. We implemented a test bed for the simulation of an interactive environment. Then, we carried out an empirical evaluation with human subjects, aimed to assess the contribution of narrative comments to the humorous effect. The results show first evidence that fictional comments, delivered as dialogue acts, increase the humor response in a statistically significant way.

Inducing an ironic effect in automated tweets

Irony gives us a way to react creatively to disappointment. By allowing us to speak of a failed expectation as though it succeeded, irony stresses the naturalness of our expectation and the absurdity of its failure. The result of this playful use of language is a subtle valence shift as listeners are alerted to a gap between what is said and what is meant. But as irony is not without risks, speakers are often careful to signal an ironic intent with tone, body language, or if on Twitter, with the hashtag #irony. Yet given the subtlety of irony, we question the effectiveness of explicit marking, and empirically show how a stronger valence shift can be induced in automatically-generated creative tweets with more nuanced signals of irony.

Making Fun of Failures Computationally

We discuss ideas and propose resources on humor facilitation, as an extension of previous work on this topic. Specifically, we describe a method for achieving humor facilitation as the combination of event detection and generation of funny comments. We focus on user’s mistakes as the preferred unexpected and potentially humorous events. Moreover, we implemented an online testbed consisting of a humor facilitator and two interactive environments: a text editor and a video game. The system is meant to provide a tool for empirical evaluation of the proposed framework.

Humor Facilitation of Polarized Events

We propose an approach for designing humor facilitation, a specific type of reactive humor consisting in the detection of events and generation of witticisms about them. More specifically, we emphasize the advantage to focus on the negative polarity of events, since this property can be detected with state-of-the-art sentiment analysis and, thus, employed to generate playfully sarcastic comments automatically.

Sparks Will Fly: engineering creative script conflicts

ABSTRACT Scripts are often dismissed as the stuff of good movies and bad politics. They codify cultural experience so rigidly that they remove our freedom of choice and become the very antithesis of creativity. Yet, mental scripts have an important role to play in our understanding of creative behaviour, since a deliberate departure from an established script can produce results that are simultaneously novel and familiar, especially when others stick to the conventional script. Indeed, creative opportunities often arise at the overlapping boundaries of two scripts that antagonistically compete to mentally organise the same situation. This work explores the computational integration of competing scripts to generate creative friction in short texts that are surprising but meaningful. Our exploration considers conventional macro-scripts – ordered sequences of actions – and the less obvious micro-scripts that operate at even the lowest levels of language. For the former, we generate plots that squeeze two scripts into a single mini-narrative; for the latter, we generate ironic descriptions that use conflicting scripts to highlight the speakers pragmatic insincerity. We show experimentally that verbal irony requires both kinds of scripts – macro and micro – to work together to reliably generate creative sparks from a speakers subversive intent.