Slip-Sliding Along in Linguistic Creativity: Building A Fluid Space for Connecting Disparate Ideas

The art of linguistic creativity lies not in finding new truths to express in language (if there are any), but in finding new and more resonant ways to express truths that are already known or implicitly accepted. Creative expression thus requires that we take adopt a new and revealing perspective on a familiar idea, one that may prompt an audience to conceptually re-represent this idea to draw out new meaning or new relevance to a situation. As such, a computational model of linguistic creativity requires a knowledge representation that is as semantically agile and accommodating as the creative speakers who use it. We thus present a flexible and very concise knowledge representation for dealing with creative metaphors, called Talking Points, and show how talking points can be acquired on a large scale both from WordNet and from the web to form a fluid connected structure called a slipnet.