State of the Art in Computer-Generated Poetry

April 7, 2014 8:33 AM

Hello my merry minions! I would like to write some software that writes some poems, sort of like this guy did. Could you point me to some examples of existing procedural poetry generators so that I can build off of them? Bonus points if there's source code or a description of the techniques they used. Thanks so much!
posted by zscore to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Leonardo Flores' I Love E-Poetry is a good blog and reference to lots and lots of digital poetry kinds of projects - that might be a good place to start rummaging around!

I made Pentametron and would be glad to answer questions here or by mail.
posted by moonmilk at 9:43 AM on April 7, 2014 [2 favorites]

Pentametron rules. I've found both Adam Parrish's (Metafilter's own) and Darius Kazemi's blogs to be helpful resources.
posted by raisindebt at 11:37 AM on April 7, 2014 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thank you both! What sorts of tools do you guys recommend outside of the NLTK for Python and the CMU pronunciation dictionary? In particular, I'm looking for some way to encode semantic information.
posted by zscore at 6:32 PM on April 7, 2014

I haven't used it myself, but NLTK has an interface for WordNet, which adds some semantic information.

I've seen some twitter bot authors use the Wordnik API for that kind of thing.
posted by moonmilk at 7:59 PM on April 7, 2014

Response by poster: Aight, I'll give it a peep. Thanks again moonmilk, and if I get anything good going I'll post it to projects.
posted by zscore at 7:39 PM on April 8, 2014