Skip to main content

Markov Text Generator for Basque Poetry

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10415))

Abstract

Poetry generation is a challenging field in the area of natural language processing. A poem is a text structured according to predefined formal rules and whose parts are semantically related. In this work we present a novel automated system to generate poetry in Basque language conditioned by non-local constraints. From a given corpus two Markov chains representing forward and backward 2-grams are built. From these Markov chains and a semantic model, a system able to generate poems conforming a given metric and following semantic cues has been designed. The user is prompted to input a theme for the poem and also a seed word to start the generating process. The system produces several poems in less than a minute, enough for using it in live events.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egunkaria.

  2. 2.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Txirrita.

  3. 3.

    http://www.bertsozale.com/en.

References

  1. Amuriza, X.: Hiztegi Errimatua. Lanku (1981)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Astigarraga, A., Jauregi, E., Lazkano, E., Agirrezabal, M.: Textual coherence in a verse-maker robot. In: Hippe, Z.S., Kulikowski, J.L., Mroczek, T., Wtorek, J. (eds.) Human-Computer Systems Interaction: Backgrounds and Applications 3. AISC, vol. 300, pp. 275–287. Springer, Cham (2014). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-08491-6_23

    Google Scholar 

  3. Astigarraga, A., Agirrezabal, M., Lazkano, E., Jauregi, E., Sierra, B.: Bertsobot: the first minstrel robot. In: 2013 The 6th International Conference on Human System Interaction (HSI), pp. 129–136. IEEE (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Barbieri, G., Pachet, F., Roy, P., Esposti, M.D.: Markov constraints for generating lyrics with style. In: Proceedings of the 20th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 115–120. IOS Press (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Cardoso, A., Veale, T., Wiggins, G.A.: Converging on the divergent: the history (and future) of the international joint workshops in computational creativity. AI Mag. 30(3), 15 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Das, A., Gambäck, B.: Poetic machine: computational creativity for automatic poetry generation in bengali. In: 5th International Conference on Computational Creativity, ICCC (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Deerwester, S., Dumais, S.T., Furnas, G.W., Landauer, T.K., Harshman, R.: Indexing by latent semantic analysis. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. 41(6), 391 (1990)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Egaña, A.: The process of creating improvised bertsos. Oral Tradit. 22(2), 117–142 (2007)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  9. Garzia, J., Sarasua, J., Egaña, A.: The art of bertsolaritza: improvised Basque verse singing. Bertsolari liburuak (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Gervás, P.: Computational modelling of poetry generation. In: Artificial Intelligence and Poetry Symposium, AISB Convention 2013. The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour, University of Exeter, United Kingdom (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Gervás, P.: Deconstructing computer poets: making selected processes available as services. Comput. Intell. 33(1), 3–31 (2015)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  12. Gervás, P.: Constrained creation of poetic forms during theme-driven exploration of a domain defined by an N-gram model. Connection Sci. 28(2), 111–130 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Jauregi, O.: Euskal testuetako silaba egituren maiztasuna diakronikoki. Anuario del Seminario de Filología Vasca “Julio de Urquijo” 37(1), 393–410 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Jurafsky, D., James, H.: Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Speech Recognition. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Lamb, C., Brown, D.G., Clarke, C.L.: A taxonomy of generative poetry techniques. In: Bridges Finland Conference Proceedings, pp. 195–202 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Langkilde, I., Knight, K.: Generation that exploits corpus-based statistical knowledge. In: Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, vol. 1, pp. 704–710. Association for Computational Linguistics (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Lord, A.B., Mitchell, S.A., Nagy, G.: The Singer of Tales, vol. 24. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Manning, C.D., Schütze, H., et al.: Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, vol. 999. MIT Press, Cambridge (1999)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  19. Gonçalo Oliveira, H., Cardoso, A.: Poetry generation with PoeTryMe. In: Besold, T.R., Schorlemmer, M., Smaill, A. (eds.) Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines. ATM, vol. 7, pp. 243–266. Atlantis Press, Paris (2015). doi:10.2991/978-94-6239-085-0_12

    Google Scholar 

  20. Oulipo, A.: Atlas de litterature potentielle. Gallimard, Collection Idees (1981)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Queneau, R.: 100.000.000.000.000 de poemes. Gallimard Series, Schoenhofs Foreign Books (1961)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Toivanen, J., Toivonen, H., Valitutti, A., Gross, O., et al.: Corpus-based generation of content and form in poetry. In: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computational Creativity, Dublin, Ireland, pp. 175–179 (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Toivanen, J.M., Järvisalo, M., Toivonen, H., et al.: Harnessing constraint programming for poetry composition. In: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computational Creativity, Sydney, Australia, pp. 160–167 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Zelaia, A., Arregi, O., Sierra, B.: Combining singular value decomposition and a multi-classifier: A new approach to support coreference resolution. Eng. Appl. AI 46, 279–286 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This paper has been supported by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, contract TIN2015-64395-R (MINECO/FEDER, UE), as well as by the Basque Government, contract IT900-16. The authors gratefully acknowledge Bertsozale Elkartea (Association of the Friends of Bertsolaritza), whose verse corpora has been used to test and develop the proposed method.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to José María Martínez-Otzeta .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG

About this paper

Cite this paper

Astigarraga, A., Martínez-Otzeta, J.M., Rodriguez, I., Sierra, B., Lazkano, E. (2017). Markov Text Generator for Basque Poetry. In: Ekštein, K., Matoušek, V. (eds) Text, Speech, and Dialogue. TSD 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10415. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64206-2_26

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64206-2_26

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-64205-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-64206-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics