A Blackboard System for Generating Poetry

Abstract

We present a system to generate poems based on the information extracted from input text such as blog posts. Our design uses the blackboard architecture, in which independent specialized modules cooperate during the generation process by sharing a common workspace known as the blackboard. Each module is responsible for a particular task while generating poetry. Our implementation incorporates modules that retrieve information from the input text, generate new ideas, or select the best partial solutions. These distinct modules (experts) are implemented as diverse computational units that make use of lexical resources, grammar models, sentiment-analyzing tools, and languageprocessing algorithms. A control module is responsible for scheduling actions on the blackboard. We argue that the blackboard architecture is a promising way of simulating creative processes because of its flexibility and compliance with the Global Workspace Theory of mind. The main contribution of this work is the design and prototype implementation of an extensible platform for a poetry-generating system that may be further extended by incorporating new experts as well as some existing poetrygenerating systems as parts of the blackboard architecture. We claim that this design provides a powerful tool for combining many of the existing efforts in the domain of automatic poetry generation.