Baseline Methods for Automated Fictional Ideation

The invention of fictional ideas (ideation) is often a central process in the creative production of artefacts such as poems, music and paintings, but has barely been studied in the Computational Creativity community. We present here three baseline approaches for automated fictional ideation, using methods which invert and alter facts from the ConceptNet and ReVerb databases, and perform bisociative discovery. For each method, we present a curation analysis, by calculating the proportion of ideas which pass a typicality evaluation. We further evaluate one ideation approach through a crowdsourcing experiment in which participants were asked to rank ideas. The results from this study, and the baseline methods and methodologies presented here, constitute a firm basis on which to build more sophisticated models for automated ideation with evaluative capacity.