The longer term value of creativity judgements in computational creativity

During research to develop the Standardised Procedure for Evaluating Creative Systems (SPECS) methodology for evaluat- ing the creativity of ‘creative’ systems, in 2011 an evaluation case study was carried out. The case study investigated how we can make a ‘snapshot’ decision, in a short space of time, on the creativity of systems in various domains. The systems to be evaluated were presented at the International Computational Creativity Conference in 2011. Evaluation was performed by people whose domain expertise ranges from expert to novice, depending on the system. The SPECS methodology was used for evaluation, and was compared to two other creativity evaluation methods (Ritchie’s criteria and Colton’s Creative Tripod) and to results from surveying people’s opinion on the creativity of the systems under investigation. Here, we revisit those results, considering them in the context of what these systems have contributed to computational creativity development. Five years on, we now have data on how influential these systems were within computational creativity, and to what extent the work in these systems has influenced further developments in computational creativity research. This paper investigates whether the evaluations of creativity of these systems have been helpful in predicting which systems will be more influential in computational creativity (as measured by paper citations and further development within later computational systems). While a direct correlation between evaluative results and longer term impact is not discovered (and perhaps too simplistic an aim, given the factors at play in determining research impact), some interesting alignments are noted between the 2011 results and the impact of papers five years on

Empowering Expression for Users with Aphasia through Constrained Creativity

Creative activities allow people to express themselves in rich, nuanced ways. However, being creative does not always come easily. For example, people with speech and language impairments, such as aphasia, face challenges in creative activities that involve language. In this paper, we explore the concept of constrained creativity as a way of addressing this challenge and enabling creative writing. We report an app, MakeWrite, that supports the constrained creation of digital texts through automated redaction. The app was co-designed with and for people with aphasia and was subsequently explored in a workshop with a group of people with aphasia. Participants were not only successful in crafting novel language, but, importantly, self-reported that the app was crucial in enabling them to do so. We refect on the potential of technology-supported constrained creativity as a means of empowering expression amongst users with diverse needs

X575: writing rengas with web services

Our software system simulates the classical collaborative Japanese poetry form, renga, made of linked haikus. We used NLP methods wrapped up as web services. Our experiments were only a partial success, since results fail to satisfy classical constraints. To gather ideas for future work, we examine related research in semiotics, linguistics, and computing.Comment: 4 pages; submitted to CC-NLG - Computational Creativity in Natural Language Generatio

Using genetic algorithms to create meaningful poetic text

Work carried out when all authors were at the University of Edinburgh.Peer reviewedPostprin