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Scientific Sonnets: Duke Team Wins Competition for Poetry-Generating Algorithm


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A team of Duke University researchers won the 2018 PoetiX Literary Creative Turing Test contest for an algorithm that composed the most "human-like" sonnets. The winning program was designed to select the rhyming end-words for a 14-line sonnet before filling in the rest of the syllables by writing backward. The team added more rhythmic automated punctuation positioning and fundamental rules to prevent certain part-of-speech errors.

"We collected many [part-of-speech] sequences that could not occur, then used this knowledge to ensure that word sequences did not violate these basic rules," the team wrote in a paper describing their algorithm.

The team also employed machine learning to teach the algorithm poetry as it was fed a collection of sonnet-like texts. "There's a lot of synergy between the aspects of the poetry that humans can generate and the other aspects that the computer can generate," said Duke's Cynthia Rudin.

From The Chronicle
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Abstracts Copyright © 2019 SmithBucklin, Washington, DC, USA


 

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