An expert system for the composition of formal Spanish poetry

The present paper presents an application that composes formal poetry in Spanish in a semiautomatic interactive fashion. ASPERA is a forward reasoning rulebased system that obtains from the user basic style parameters and an intended message; applies a knowledge-based preprocessor to select the most appropriate metric structure for the user's wishes; and, by intelligent adaptation of selected examples from a corpus of verses, carries out a prose-topoetry translation of the given message. In the composition process, ASPERA combines natural language generation and CBR techniques to apply a set of construction heuristics obtained from formal literature on Spanish poetry. If the user validates the poem draft presented by the system, the resulting verses are analysed and incorporated into the system data files.