Proceedings of International Conference on Computing Sciences

WILKES100 ICCS 2013

ISBN: 978-93-5107-172-3
Romeo's desk - On the search of what constitutes a romantic

Gurpreet Singh
1*
and Hector-Hugo Franco Penya
2

1
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Lovely Professional University, PB, India
2
Trento RISE, University of Trento, Via Sommarive, 18, 38123 Povo, ITALY
Abstract
This article presents the ongoing work on the creation of online poem editor software. The aim of the project is to collect
corpora of poems while they are written in order to enable further studies on the creative process of poem edition. As an
incentive for poets to use the system, the platform also provides a dictionary of rhyming words, an automatic syllabification
algorithm to facilitate the process of writing and a chat bot which aims to stimulate the creativity of the user but does not to
write the poem. If the users agree, they can also publish their poems on the web portal, which will establish authorship and
provide a mechanism to detect plagiarism. We also expect the reader-users to assist to classify poems, which will enable
further research on what constitutes a romantic poem, in comparison with non-romantic poetry. Also, the logs of the chat bot
may provide further data to perform research on the psychological effects of romantic love.
2013 Elsevier Science. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Poem editor, Computational Poetry, Corpora Collection, romantic love
1. Introduction
G.Miller [1] proposed that creativity in humans is equivalent to a peacock's tail, i.e. if the genes of a particular
individual afford to create a creatively skilled brain then the genes must be good. Therefore that individual is
attractive to the opposite sex.
Within that theory poetry is the way to make communication more difficult. Hence, being capable of
communicating in poetry is a fitness indicator of having good genes, in biological terms, leading to higher
success in the sex selection process. The same principle can be applied to a broad vocabulary or complex
grammar, and any type of art or creativity. The efforts to display creativity, vocabulary or talent should be
displayed in love poetry to emphasize the wooing process, because those displays are part of the processes. If that
is the case, it should be observable that love poems have more complex vocabulary or rhyming patterns than
other literary genres, as the attractiveness of the author will be partly judged by his/her skills. It may be
observable that the authors of love poems make more corrections to increase the complexity of their language
than they would do for other types of documents. This project is an attempt to test this hypothesis by creating an
on-line poem editor which would collect, anonymously, information on the editing process (with the consent of
the users).
2. Market Analysis
An on-line survey was conducted through Web-tools focusing on US American male internet users (any age).
The above graph illustrates the responses to the question ``Would you use software/web service that would
help you to write poems for your loved ones'', where five answer were allowed, two positive, two negative and
*
Corresponding author: Gurpreet Singh.
411 Elsevier Publications, 2013
Gurpreet Singh and Hector-Hugo Franco Penya
one neutral one.The graph excludes the negative answers, as they are irrelevant for this endeavor. Positive
answers represent a huge minority among the younger population: from 18-44 years of age. People under 18
years of age were not asked as it is harder to obtain consent to collect corpora from them. Women were excluded
from the survey because from a business perspective we suspect men become more compulsive buyers when they
fall in love than women.
Fig.1 Market Analysis
3. Similar Projects
Multiple projects connected to poetry assistants can be found in academia and industry. For instance [2],
industrial products such as MasterWriter [3], industrial research undertakings such as (http:// duilian. msra. cn/)
or even projects carried out by people as a hobby such as Poeta Zurdo [4].
4. State of the Development
The current prototype is divided into two web applications, the poem editor and a poem viewer. Currently the
system works in the Spanish language but it will be extended to work in English as well. These are:
4.1. Poem Editor
This web application contains three sub-systems: A word syllabificator, a rhyming word dictionary, and a
chat bot.
412 Elsevier Publications, 2013
Romeos desk - on the search of what constitutes a romantic poem?
4.1.1 Word syllabificator
As the user writes a poem, the system splits the words into syllables, helping the user to count them and to align
the stress of the words. It also allows synalephas (merging two syllables into one) when the language allows it.
4.1.2 Rhyming word dictionary
The user is also allowed to search for rhyming words, the system searches automatically rhyming words as
each verse is completed but also permits the user to make a manual search.
4.1.3 Chat bot
The Chat bot is meant to inspire and to stimulate the user to start writing, without telling the user what to write.
The conversations will be kept anonymously as part of the corpora with the consent of the author. The current
version is having the same architecture of Eliza. The boot search for patterns that match the query from the user,
and replays by giving the sentence associated to the patter that is more similar to the user input. The only
difference with Eliza is that if the users do not interact with the chat bot or change the poem, after 3 minutes the
bot will try to continue the conversation.
4.1.4 Word predictor
Future work will include a word predictor, for mobile and tablet users, to complete/predict the words they are
typing.
4.1.5 Corpora collection
The system not only collects the poems but also the writing process (logging), saving multiple versions every
time that a new word is written or a correction is made.
4.2 Poem Viewer
Once the poem is complete, it is possible to display it on a website. The goal of this web application is to
display some of the poems to the public, with the consent of the author, allowing the public to rate and to classify
them.
Information about rankings will be used in the future to identify what constitutes a romantic poem.
4.3 Social media
The most experienced poets show they wish to be able to broadcast their poems through internet (Facebook
and Twitter) as images, in order to reach as much audience as possible but without being easily plagiarised.
Others seem happy to allow re-edition as long as a reference to the original poem is kept.
4.4 Corpora
As of J une 23rd 2013, the data base collected 155 poems and 82 of them had permission to be used for
research anonymously. Also, users provided generous feedback about how the system could be improved.
The corpora can be made publicly available as a part of this research work.
5. Potential Impact
It is expected that his project will impact in following ways:
5.1 Natural Language Processing
The project needs to combine several natural language technologies, with different challenges. Poetry forces
the authors to use language in a complicated way. This may represent a challenge to text classification systems,
and that is why it is an interesting problem to analyse. Combining a dialogue system, capable of understanding
the text being edited, is also an interesting challenge. Word prediction for poetry is not a new problem as poetry
generation systems already exist. This framework is, however, new because the system just has to make
suggestions without generating text.
413 Elsevier Publications, 2013
Gurpreet Singh and Hector-Hugo Franco Penya
5.2 Outreach
Poetry web pages as [5] identify young women as their main customers, which suggests that this project will
also be of interest for them. For this reason, it is expected that this project can assist young women understand
what is science and to appreciate it.
5.3 Psychology
The collected data from poems and the chat bot can help other researches understand the feeling of excitement
or depression in relationships.
6. Acknowledgements
This project is developed and maintained by volunteers and we wish to thank all of them. Thanks to Snega
Balaji, Maximo Desimone and Antonio de la Cruz for coding part of the system.
References
[1] G. F. Miller, The Mating Mind. How Sexual Selection Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature, Double-day, 2000.
[2] N. Mamede, I. Trancoso, An electronic assistant for poetry writing, Advances in Artificial Intelligence.
[3] URL http://www.springerlink.com/index/NDUDEQKLRU98A5NY.pdf
[4] B. DeVorzon, MasterWriter www.masterwriter.com (2008).
[5] P. Zurdo, Poeta zurdo http:// usuarios. multimania.es/ poetazurdo/ (2011).
[6] E-Promotions, http://lovepoetry.com/advertising/index.html (2013).
414 Elsevier Publications, 2013
Index

D
Decryption
structure of, 409

L
Lattice transpose, 407

P
Portable encryption algorithm
algorithm, basic structure of, 405408
decryption, 409
key size and key generation, 403405