PhD Seminar • Bioinformatics Group — TwitSong: The Evolution of a Poetry Generator

Carolyn Lamb, PhD candidate
David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science

We describe three versions of TwitSong, a system that generates poetry based on the news. TwitSong is designed to make aesthetic decisions about potential lines of poetry and, in the third version, to edit its own work. We describe how the system was developed, how it performs in user studies, and why this type of computer-generated poetry still has a long way to go.