UCD Year One: Idea Generation & Delivery in UCD Year One: Idea Generation & Delivery in

Let my creepy avatar*

guide you on a whimsical

tour of UCD’s year of knowledge

representation, idea generation,

linguistic rendering and

automatic tweeting. *Tony Veale *Tony Veale

Please excuse

my absence, as I

am unavoidably

elsewhere on UCD

business.

So kindly bear

with these slides as

we briefly outline the

main contributions of

UCD in Y1.

UCD is a major

contributor to WP3:

Automated Ideation

& What-If Scenario

Generation

In Year One this

involves two tasks:

T3.1: Taking

metaphors seriously

&

T3.2: Taking jokes

seriously

Why so

serious?

UCD anchors its

solutions for both of

these tasks in an

automated metaphor-

generation

system.

UCD offers its

Web Service

Metaphor Magnet to

commoditize the

generation of novel

metaphors on an

industrial

scale.

UCD is also a

contributor to WP2:

Building wide-

coverage Open IE

knowledge

resources

UCD has built and released

a KB of more than 5000

causally-chained triples for

reasoning about grand

themes like Love, War,

Religion, Sex, Politics, Art,

Science, etc.

So for Task T2.2

in Workpackage

WP2 …

A chain of causal

triples can yield an

interesting What-If

when it shows how a

familiar concept has

quite unexpected

consequences.

So what counts

as an unexpected

consequence of a

What-If scenario?

UCD has focused in Y1 on

affective causal chains.

A chain is interesting if:

1. A positive concept

ultimately causes a

negative consequence.

2. A negative concept

ultimately causes a

positive consequence.

UCD’s ideation engine sits at the heart of our @MetaphorMagnet

Twitterbot, which tweets a new hard-

boiled metaphor every hour of the day.

So @MetaphorMagnet achieves shock value via causal equivalence: it uses simple reasoning

over its knowledge-base to ask: what if two very different concepts lead

to the same logical ends?

An opposition between ideas can be used to imagine an opposition

between those who hold ideas. @MetaphorMagnet constructs an imaginary debate between

these opposing thinkers.

Conflict between and within characters is the key to a psychologically

compelling story. Just think of Breaking Bad: a

good father and chemistry teacher becomes a

murderous drug baron!

As @MetaphorMagnet specializes in generating

metaphorical pairings that emphasize both the commonalities and the

contrasts between ideas, we can turn these pairings

into character arcs.

W.H.I.M.

businessman

millionaire tech geek

pauper

If we take @MetaphorMagnet’s metaphors seriously, as literal statements of becoming, we

obtain What-If scenarios in which our story characters undergo surprising but apt changes.

IN

{ }

Property-level transformations:

dashingdrab happymiserable richpoor richskint ostentatiousunpretentious pamperedpoor

privilegeddestitute privilegedpoor richbroke richdesperate richdestitute richmiserable

spoiledpoor wealthybroke wealthydestitute wealthypoor

So what if a millionaire …

… became a pauper?

@MetaphorMagnet aligns the contrasting properties of both stereotypical representations to estimate the interestingness of an arc.

This approach to ideation in

WHIM has recently been covered

in New Scientist magazine.

We are currently evaluating the

packaging of ideas in @MetaphorMagnet

using Crowd-sourcing (against a non-

creative baseline @MetaphorMinute).

WHIM also benefits from PROSECCO*

events

*PROmoting the Scientific Exploration of Computational

Creativity (EC Action)

PROSECCO’s 2015 Code-Camp will

build new bots for ideation & rendering

The substantial resources UCD is developing for the

camp will feed directly into the WHIM project.

Quickly now, Mr. Veale, what are

the fields of your representation?

Damn you, Colton! The fields are: name, gender, politics, marital status, specialism, address, vehicle, weapon,

rivals, clothing, domain, genre, category, positive qualities

and negative qualities!

FIN

Year 2 will bring more knowledge (rich resources), more complex ideas, more

ground for cross-group collaboration, and

deeper stories.