From California Magazine
The Bot Versus the Bard: Researchers Teach a Computer to Write Poetry
By Katia Savchuk
What’s in the brain that ink may character
Which hath not figured to thee my true spirit
King of hell no quarrel have I left thee
No lovely maid who gleaned in fields or skies
One pair of lines above is the work of Shakespeare. The other was written by a computer. Can you tell which is which?
If you’re having a hard time, that’s just what a group of UC Berkeley researchers intended (read on for the answer). A four-person team from the School of Information and the Graduate School of Education designed a computer algorithm that spits out sonnets. Dubbed the Pythonic Poet (after the computer programming language), it competed in Dartmouth College’s spring PoetiX competition, in which sonnet generators are judged according to how “human” their poems seem.
I-School graduate students Andrea Gagliano and Emily Paul, who completed her master’s degree in May, kicked off the project last fall in a class on natural language processing. They continued polishing their verse-generating code in independent study, working with Professor Marti Hearst of the I-School and Kyle Booten, a Ph.D student in education....