Monday, September 24, 2007
Making more of less
It's the readers, of course, who "make" the generated poem, not me, certainly not the machine. But what the machine and I can do is to make it easier for the reader. Consider this result from one of yesterday's tests:
Intent
Bitterly, blue breeze held, like a ruby
vow
My body dwelling,
unknown and cherry, my ribs
dying
They cherish
Imperial mornings, imperial strange pains
Gay, delirious, strange as this shadow
"I drink affections," I whispered
Note that there are no terminating punctuation marks. It's possible to make it so, but not as easy as one might think. Because the grammar is designed to allow adjoining of TAG trees at various points within other trees, it is not the case that a tree can ever know whether it is concluding a "sentence." And writing a terminating punctuation node is difficult, because it might conflict with other concluding marks, such as the question mark. But this whole thing is hard. Why avoid this particular challenge?
As with everything here, there's a reason (not necessarily a good reason, but at least a thought-through reason). In this case, the absence is deliberate so as to give the reader as much leeway for individual interpretation as possible. In the poem above, the reader can read "They cherish" as its own discrete utterance (which it is in the syntactic structure of the poem) or as the subject-predicate prelude to "Imperial mornings..." Is it "They cherish. / Imperial mornings..." or is it "They cherish imperial mornings...." Each reader will make a choice, no doubt a function of their history with poetry. The programmer's job is not to legislate the reading, but to enable it.
There's a lot more going on in "Intent," but I'll leave those discussions for another day.
# posted by Jim @ 8:10 PM 
