Download - WHIM: The What-If Machine
UCD Year One: Idea Generation & Delivery in UCD Year One: Idea Generation & Delivery in
Let my creepy avatar*
guide you on a whimsical
tour of UCD’s year of knowledge
representation, idea generation,
linguistic rendering and
automatic tweeting. *Tony Veale *Tony Veale
Please excuse
my absence, as I
am unavoidably
elsewhere on UCD
business.
So kindly bear
with these slides as
we briefly outline the
main contributions of
UCD in Y1.
UCD is a major
contributor to WP3:
Automated Ideation
& What-If Scenario
Generation
In Year One this
involves two tasks:
T3.1: Taking
metaphors seriously
&
T3.2: Taking jokes
seriously
Why so
serious?
UCD anchors its
solutions for both of
these tasks in an
automated metaphor-
generation
system.
UCD offers its
Web Service
Metaphor Magnet to
commoditize the
generation of novel
metaphors on an
industrial
scale.
UCD is also a
contributor to WP2:
Building wide-
coverage Open IE
knowledge
resources
UCD has built and released
a KB of more than 5000
causally-chained triples for
reasoning about grand
themes like Love, War,
Religion, Sex, Politics, Art,
Science, etc.
So for Task T2.2
in Workpackage
WP2 …
A chain of causal
triples can yield an
interesting What-If
when it shows how a
familiar concept has
quite unexpected
consequences.
So what counts
as an unexpected
consequence of a
What-If scenario?
UCD has focused in Y1 on
affective causal chains.
A chain is interesting if:
1. A positive concept
ultimately causes a
negative consequence.
2. A negative concept
ultimately causes a
positive consequence.
UCD’s ideation engine sits at the heart of our @MetaphorMagnet
Twitterbot, which tweets a new hard-
boiled metaphor every hour of the day.
So @MetaphorMagnet achieves shock value via causal equivalence: it uses simple reasoning
over its knowledge-base to ask: what if two very different concepts lead
to the same logical ends?
An opposition between ideas can be used to imagine an opposition
between those who hold ideas. @MetaphorMagnet constructs an imaginary debate between
these opposing thinkers.
Conflict between and within characters is the key to a psychologically
compelling story. Just think of Breaking Bad: a
good father and chemistry teacher becomes a
murderous drug baron!
As @MetaphorMagnet specializes in generating
metaphorical pairings that emphasize both the commonalities and the
contrasts between ideas, we can turn these pairings
into character arcs.
W.H.I.M.
businessman
millionaire tech geek
pauper
If we take @MetaphorMagnet’s metaphors seriously, as literal statements of becoming, we
obtain What-If scenarios in which our story characters undergo surprising but apt changes.
IN
{ }
Property-level transformations:
dashingdrab happymiserable richpoor richskint ostentatiousunpretentious pamperedpoor
privilegeddestitute privilegedpoor richbroke richdesperate richdestitute richmiserable
spoiledpoor wealthybroke wealthydestitute wealthypoor
So what if a millionaire …
… became a pauper?
@MetaphorMagnet aligns the contrasting properties of both stereotypical representations to estimate the interestingness of an arc.
This approach to ideation in
WHIM has recently been covered
in New Scientist magazine.
We are currently evaluating the
packaging of ideas in @MetaphorMagnet
using Crowd-sourcing (against a non-
creative baseline @MetaphorMinute).
WHIM also benefits from PROSECCO*
events
*PROmoting the Scientific Exploration of Computational
Creativity (EC Action)
PROSECCO’s 2015 Code-Camp will
build new bots for ideation & rendering
The substantial resources UCD is developing for the
camp will feed directly into the WHIM project.
Quickly now, Mr. Veale, what are
the fields of your representation?
Damn you, Colton! The fields are: name, gender, politics, marital status, specialism, address, vehicle, weapon,
rivals, clothing, domain, genre, category, positive qualities
and negative qualities!
FIN
Year 2 will bring more knowledge (rich resources), more complex ideas, more
ground for cross-group collaboration, and
deeper stories.