Haiku Generator that Reads Blogs and Illustrates Them with Sounds and Images

In this paper we introduce our haiku generator, which, in contrast to other systems, is not restricted to limited classic vocabulary sets and preserves a classic style without becoming too random and abstract because it performs a semantic integrity check using the Internet. Moreover, it is able to analyze blog entry input and, by using nouns and adjectives for web-mining, to stay on topic and still preserve kigo, traditional seasonal words used in Japanese poetry. The haiku generator utilizes grammar templates automatically generated from poems written by Japanese poets and a lexicon of 2,473 kigo words from an online haiku repository. In addition to generating haiku poems, it can output them vocally together with related sound effects and images retrieved from the WWW. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed system generates high-quality haikus and that using contentrelated input and multimedia-rich output is effective for increasing users’ satisfaction. We have performed impression evaluation experiments and confirmed that our method is especially useful for generating haikus with higher depth and soundsharpness, which are two very important categories in professional evaluation of Japanese poetry. Next, haikus generated using the proposed method were evaluated by blog authors and blog readers and again, the proposed method outperformed the baseline. We also measured how the presence or absence of multimedia output influenced the evaluation. While using both vocal output and an image achieved higher scores than text alone, there were cases in which some combinations of effects were evaluated higher than all the effects used together. With our original approach to generating poetry, we wish to show the importance of new media and possibilities that are arising from the utilization of the “wisdom of (web-)crowds” in order to achieve higher standards for AI-generated art.