I think it's a great idea and not a waste of time. Consider that I don't know of another programming site that has a whole section just about Poetry! Something about Perl lends itself to it, and that might just be the part that makes it so satisfying and powerful. So your research could have a big impact on the rest of us too. (Of course a good poem does too.. I like Poe and Yeats a lot myself).

No really, this seems to cover the fascinating fields of computational linguistics, and natural language processing, cognitive science, AI, semantics and text engineering. Run some searches!

Some other links I found are this page about computer-generated poetry and text, and this other which has a bunch of poetry and related things on it. Didn't think #2 would have state of the art, though Kurzweil's program is listed. Oh and Google has a web directory related to this. Anyway.

I do remember finding an online dictionary somewhere when I was looking at speech generation last year, you will need obviously a kind of lexicon. These exist and aren't a hurdle. Some other grammar programs are here.

There is an online book about the state of the art 6 years ago.. here. But maybe you want to look at the Natural Language Software Registry which has a list of tools and refers to it. It would be very cool if you found something nice and made a CPAN module out of it so we can have fun with your work too! (Besides reading, er, the poetry.. :) And there is the OpenNLP and the GATE project which are open source.

Finally you may wish to see Jordan Boyd-Graber's project on semantic poetry creation (pdf/txt). I hesitate to mention it as it seems to have been done just before college, but it appears to make poetry (no program, look at the evolutionzone link above for one), and he won $1000 from Intel a couple years ago for it which is impressive. Ah! I just looked at his bibliography and found the lexicon I remembered finding last year.. Princeton's WordNet. But be careful.. semantic poetry means just relying on dictionary meanings, no cliches or baggage as mentioned here and here. So getting a program to be expressive could be one of the hurdles, and one of the most interesting parts of the work.

Maybe it would be good to take time out to study writing poetry without a computer too, in case you haven't. I'd imagine that your mind and sense of artistry and serendipity are going to be important to testing the software and following interesting clues.

I like WordNet's definition of poetry.. "poetry -- (any communication resembling poetry in beauty or the evocation of feeling)". Perhaps this will give you the latitude you need to make something enjoyable and useful. I had fun looking at this stuff again. Good luck!

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.