An electronic assistant for poetry writing

The ultimate goal of the poetry assistant currently under development in our lab is an application to be used either as a poetry game or as a teaching tool for both poetry and grammar, including the complex relationships between sound and meaning. Until now we focused on the automatic classification of poems and the suggestion of the ending word for a verse. The classification module is based on poetic concepts that take into account structure and metrics. The prediction module uses several criteria to select the ending word: the structural constraints of the poem, the grammatical category of the words, and the statistical language models obtained from a text corpus. The first version of the system, rather than being self-contained, is still based on the use of different heterogeneous modules. We are currently working on a second version based on a modular architecture that facilitates the reuse of the linguistic processing modules already developed within the lab.