On Creative Uses of Word Associations

The ability to associate concepts is an important factor of creativity. We investigate the power of simple word co-occurrence analysis in tasks requiring verbal creativity. We first consider the Remote Associates Test, a psychometric measure of creativity. It turns out to be very easy for computers with access to statistics from a large corpus. Next, we address generation of poetry, an act with much more complex creative aspects. We outline methods that can produce surprisingly good poems based on existing linguistic corpora but otherwise minimal amounts of knowledge about language or poetry. The success of these simple methods suggests that corpus-based approaches can be powerful tools for computational support of creativity.