Automated Fictional Ideation via Knowledge Base Manipulation

• Published in: Cognitive computation 2016-04, Vol.8 (2), p.153-174
• Main Authors: Llano, Maria Teresa, Colton, Simon, Hepworth, Rose, Gow, Jeremy
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; Automation; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Biomedicine; Computation by Abstract Devices; Computational Biology/Bioinformatics; Creativity; Crowdsourcing; Data mining; Knowledge bases (artificial intelligence); Natural language; Neurosciences; Statistical analysis
• ISSN: 1866-9956; 1866-9964
• DOI: 10.1007/s12559-015-9366-4

The invention of fictional ideas (ideation) is often a central process in the creative production of artefacts such as poems, music and paintings, but has barely been studied in the computational creativity community. We present here a general approach to automated fictional ideation that works by manipulating facts specified in knowledge bases. More specifically, we specify a number of constructions which, by altering and combining facts from a knowledge base, result in the generation of fictions. Moreover, we present an instantiation of these constructions through the use of ConceptNet, a database of common sense knowledge. In order to evaluate the success of these constructions, we present a curation analysis that calculates the proportion of ideas which pass a typicality judgement. We further evaluate the output of this approach through a crowd-sourcing experiment in which participants were asked to rank ideas. We found a positive correlation between the participant’s rankings and a chaining inference technique that automatically assesses the value of the fictions generated through our approach. We believe that these results show that this approach constitutes a firm basis for automated fictional ideation with evaluative capacity.