Towards Transformational Creation of Novel Songs

We study transformational computational creativity in the context of writing songs and describe an implemented system that is able to modify its own goals and operation. With this, we contribute to three aspects of computational creativity and song generation: (1) Application-wise, songs are an interesting and challenging target for creativity, as they require the production of complementary music and lyrics. (2) Technically, we approach the problem of creativity and song generation using constraint programming. We show how constraints can be used declaratively to define a search space of songs so that a standard constraint solver can then be used to generate songs. (3) Conceptually, we describe a concrete architecture for transformational creativity where the creative (song writing) system has some responsibility for setting its own search space and goals. In the proposed architecture, a meta-level control component does this transparently by manipulating the constraints at runtime based on self-reflection of the system. Empirical experiments suggest the system is able to create songs according to its own taste.Peer reviewe

"Let Everything Turn Well in Your Wife" : Generation of Adult Humor Using Lexical Constraints

Peer reviewe

Using Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation to Sense Abstract Data

We propose using galvanic vestibular stimulation for presenting abstract data, for instance stock market trends. Using galvanic vestibular stimulation, data is felt directly as a perturbation in the sense of balance. This work is showcased as an art performance, where stock market fluctuations cause a person to maintain or lose balance. We present the artistic and technical principles underlying the performance and describe the technical implementation of a working system. The work shows how abstract data can be presented in a way that is not limited to visual, auditory, olfactory, or tactile sensing.Peer reviewe

Computational generation and dissection of lexical replacement humor

International audienceABSTRACT 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

Let Everything Turn Well in Your Wife

International audienceWe propose a method for automated gen-eration of adult humor by lexical replace-ment and present empirical evaluation re-sults of the obtained humor. We proposethree types of lexical constraints as build-ing blocks of humorous word substitu-tion: constraints concerning the similarityof sounds or spellings of the original wordand the substitute, a constraint requiringthe substitute to be a taboo word, and con-straints concerning the position and con-text of the replacement. Empirical ev-idence from extensive user studies indi-cates that these constraints can increasethe effectiveness of humor generation sig-nificantly