Deep-Speare is an artificial intelligence program that was trained to write sonnets like William Shakespeare. I always love doing research and I don’t talk about research much on my posts but this is the perfect blend with bookworm world and my research world haha so I thought I would share this news !

First, let’s play a game and see if you can tell which one is from the AI and which one is from Shakespeare ? Let me know in the comments 😉

A.

have sent me from the knowledge of thine hand

what thou hast done it, then for god is great stand

in thy body and the heart of life

a breath to him in comfort, and no more

B.

even here we look again; and we may pass o god!

the man, here in our hearts are lean

between their light, our souls go upward on

their strength and spirits live another hence

The fascinating part of this AI is that it creates its rhythm, rhyme scheme, and the basic grammar ! First off, how did they do it? Like any other machine learning, you have to train your AI to recognize the pattern before it generates content on its own. For example, for this project, the researchers used 2,700 sonnets from the Gutenberg Project.  

It learns via an ensemble of three  models : LSTM for language generation, Pentameter Model for rythm generation and a Rhyme Model for rhyme (duh haha).  What separates this research is that they consider the aesthetics of poetry. Sonnets for example have strict rules and patterns, they wanted to see if the AI could learn all of it autonomously.

When Deep-Speare learns all the rules:

1.they gave it three different rhyme templates to choose from: AABB, ABBA, and the ABAB.

2. the language model proceeded to generate the words of poetry lines

3. then, when it reached a word that should rhyme, it offered candidate words to the rhyme model.

Pretty cool right? :O Obviously, this is the VERY short version of the research project, I’m going to link you the paper here for those who are curious to read more about it (ps if you are interested in discussing the paper with me,  you are welcome to,  also I’m a beginner in this programming languages stuff  =)

Click to access P18-1181.pdf