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The Writer’s Best Friend: A computational assistant for creative writing
Researchers: Hazel Smith, Roger Dean (MARCS) and Jason Shaw (MARCS)
This project seeks to augment human expressive capability in creative writing with computational agents that help writers extend their stylistic range. It builds on the Virtual Interactivity Project developed by Roger Dean, Hazel Smith, David Worrall in the computer language Python to assist text generation in creative works; on scholarly work by Hazel Smith on text generation in the work of D. Fox Harrell and others; and on work by Roger Dean in the field of computer-generated musical composition. In the next stage of the project Artificial Neural Nets (ANN) will be trained to generate and evaluate a range of expressions based on dimensions of the human experience of text. The resulting tool, the Writing Collaborator, will transform inputs from writers into texts that deviate along user-specified dimensions. Facilitating writing that engages a broader range of expression, the Writing Collaborator is a 21st Century addition to the writer’s toolbox, delivering both practical benefits for the everyday writer and a powerful engine for the creative generation of text in performance.
