When reflective feedback triggers goal revision: a computational model for literary creativity

Existing models of the writing task from a cognitive viewpoint agree on the importance of draft revision in the overall process. This is generally assumed to focus on reviewing intermediate drafts in search for feedback on how to modify them to match the driving constraints. However, in literary creativity it is often the case that the feedback leads not to a revision of the current draft but to a redefinition of the constraints that are driving the process. This phenomenon is explicitly described in Sharples’ model of writing as a creative task. Yet existing computational models of literary creativity do not contemplate it. The present paper describes a computational model of the creative processes in literary creativity that contemplates the explicit representation of the constraints driving the process, and allows for the feedback from the validation to modify not just the ongoing draft but also the constraints that it is expected to satisfy. This allows the model to represent cases of serendipitous discovery of interesting features.