Andrea Gagliano and Kyle Booten Featured on Berkeley ISchool News
BCNM's Andrea Gagliano (MIMS '17) and Kyle Booten (Education Ph.D. candidate) were recently featured in the Berkeley School of Information news article "Teaching a Computer to Write Poetry". The team also includes alumna Emily Paul (MIMS ’16) and I School professor Marti Hearst. The article discusses their challenges in designing a computer system to pass the Turing Test, understand metaphor, and create a sonnet, as well as participating in the Poetix competition for compueter-written poetry. An excerpt from the article can be read below:
"For decades, computers have been taking over tasks previously done by humans. Now a team of Berkeley I School researchers is taking that to the next level by designing a computer system that writes poetry.
'Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity,' wrote William Wordsworth. Can a computer — without feelings or emotion — really match a human poet? Can a computer independently write poetry that is comparable to human poetry? That is the challenge faced by the team."
You can also read the paper "Intersecting Word Vectors to Take Figurative Language to New Heights", which was presented by Gagliano, Paul, Booten, and Hearst at the 5th Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Literature on June 16, 2016 in San Diego, California.