Creatively subverting messages in posters

Lorenzo Gatti Charles Callaway Carlo Strapparava Marco Guerini Oliviero Stock

FBK-irst, Trento RISE

Why

Why
Along most streets, advertisements are trying to grab our attention. One way to defend ourselves is to creatively alter the message seen. Subvertising is the counterculture-art practice of creatively changing advertisements on billboards.. SUBVERTISER: a mobile application to take a picture of a poster, and to automatically produce a new virtual version of it with a creative variation of its linguistic expression, but maintaining the same graphic style.

Subvertising

Tesco, Every little helps and its logo are copyrighted trademarks of Tesco plc.

Subvertising

Tesco, Every little helps and its logo are copyrighted trademarks of Tesco plc. Image taken from http://ellistration.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/tesco_lie.jpeg

Valentino
Valentino1 (Valenced Text Inoculator) modifies a message by changing its affective valence. Valentino requires just two inputs: the message we want to slant, and a coefficient ranging from -2 to +2, that decides the direction and intensity of the slanting. I ate [a very good dish]NP I ate [an incredibly good dish]NP (+1)

I ate [an incredibly delicious dish]NP (+2) I ate [a disgusting dish]NP

1Guerini

(-1.5)

M., Strapparava C. & Stock O. Valentino: A tool for Valence Shifting of Natural Language Texts, in Proceedings of LREC2008, and Slanting Existing Text with Valentino, in Proceedings of IUI2011

Valentino
Valentino resources are based on WordNet and SentiWordNet. Ordered Vectors of Valenced Terms (OVVT) are used to swap words. They are built from WordNet antonyms (ugly beautiful), then searching the nearsynonyms (for adjectives) and hyponyms (for nouns and verbs). Then, words are ordered by adding the SentiWordNet scores. Example:

hideous
ugly

(-)
antonymy

pretty
beautiful

unnatural
(+)

gorgeous

Valentino
Modifier-OVVTs are based on contextual relations from the Google Web 1T 5grams corpus. Original: Without n-grams: With n-grams: This is a [good dish]NP This is a [well-behaved dish]NP* This is a [delicious dish]NP

Example of a modifier-OVVT: adjectives for the noun dish, near synonyms of good

(+)

(-)

Mobile interface

Mobile interface
Subvertiser: iPhone app to graphically
modify a message

Four interaction steps:

Taking/choosing a picture

Selecting text region

Spellchecking Choosing a new message

Mobile interface
Subvertiser: iPhone app to graphically
modify a message

Four interaction steps:

Taking/choosing a picture

Selecting text region

Spellchecking Choosing a new message

Mobile interface
Subvertiser: iPhone app to graphically
modify a message

Four interaction steps:

Taking/choosing a picture

Selecting text region

Spellchecking Choosing a new message

Mobile interface
Subvertiser: iPhone app to graphically
modify a message

Four interaction steps:

Taking/choosing a picture

Selecting text region

Spellchecking Choosing a new message

Mobile interface
Subvertiser: iPhone app to graphically
modify a message

Four interaction steps:

Taking/choosing a picture

Selecting text region

Spellchecking Choosing a new message

Mobile interface
Subvertiser: iPhone app to graphically
modify a message

Four interaction steps:

Taking/choosing a picture

Selecting text region

Spellchecking Choosing a new message

Mobile interface
Subvertiser: iPhone app to graphically
modify a message

Four interaction steps:

Taking/choosing a picture

Selecting text region

Spellchecking Choosing a new message

Mobile interface
Subvertiser: iPhone app to graphically
modify a message

Four interaction steps:

Taking/choosing a picture

Selecting text region

Spellchecking Choosing a new message

Mobile interface
Subvertiser: iPhone app to graphically
modify a message

Four interaction steps:

Taking/choosing a picture

Selecting text region

Spellchecking Choosing a new message

Mobile interface
Subvertiser: iPhone app to graphically
modify a message

Four interaction steps:

Taking/choosing a picture

Selecting text region

Spellchecking Choosing a new message

Mobile interface
Subvertiser: iPhone app to graphically
modify a message

Four interaction steps:

Taking/choosing a picture

Selecting text region

Spellchecking Choosing a new message

Mobile interface
Subvertiser: iPhone app to graphically
modify a message

Four interaction steps:

Taking/choosing a picture

Selecting text region

Spellchecking Choosing a new message

Resulting image

System architecture
User interaction Take photo and select text Done by system OCR, color and position detection
Reconstruct background

Spellcheck OCR results

Font detection using WTF

Query Valentino server

Choose new message

Generate new text lines using WTF

Apply new text over image

Further work
More creative capabilities in Valentino (e.g. corpus-based processing oriented to reproducing novel, acceptable variations)
Better text analysis and better generation Rhetoric and persuasive intents recognition Generation of specific evaluative expressions (e.g. ethical/aesthetic etc) Wider range of variations: affect removal, irony and sarcasm, etc. Evaluation with users (Guerini, M. Strapparava, C. and Stock, O. Ecological evaluation of persuasive messages using Google Adwords. In ACL2012)