NerudAI

Computer poet using artificial inteligence

I bet you sometimes saw a computer generated poetry – usually all it does is create rhymes at the end of the line with random words. We wanted to do something different as this is a festival combining art with technology. We experimented with teaching the computer how the czech language works and how poetry should look like. NerudAI uses deep neural network LSTM which has been trained on hundreds of thousand of amateur poetry pieces from depths of czech internet. It learned itself czech pretty well and sometimes can even think of a funny idea. But as most of the poetry we showed it was depressive (maybe amateur poets should try not to be so down sometimes) it almost achieves worse sadness than robot Marvin from the Hitchikers guide to the Galaxy itself.

How to get a poem?

Our network unfortunately works only in czech language – but you can generate a poem for your Czech friends – just hit enter button on the keyboard and wait for your poem to print! Pressing enter lets you write a poem on a random topic. In case you want to enter the topic and the name of the poem, just type it on the keyboard and after pressing the enter key, NerudAI tries to put a poem on your topic. But we have to say that the results with random generation are better. In case you do not print, please call someone from the festival and he will help you.

How does it work?

LSTM learns the representation of a series of numbers – we presented it all poems as a serie of vectors and it tries to learn which letter should be next.
generates one after the other in a row - so the system itself learned Czech and can sometimes create a word. This is, of course, a funny experiment that works with a big one
the degree of chance - that is why the results often have to be chosen. But sometimes the system puts something very interesting.