Process Based Evaluation of Computer Generated Poetry

Abstract

This paper presents and evaluates a novel sys-tem for computer generated poetry. Framed within contemporary theoretical trends in the evaluation of computational creativity, we investigate how evidence of generative process influences readers’ opinions of computer generated textual output. In addition to a technical description of our system, we present re-sults from a study asking respondents to evaluate short computer generated poems prefaced with different types of descriptions, in some cases objectively presenting the poem as the product of a statistical analysis of corpora and in some cases subjectively presenting the computer as a self-aware agent.