TITLE:  Exploding the Creativity Myth: The Computational Foundations of
        Linguistic Creativity


Creativity is a highly-prized and widely-celebrated facet of human
behaviour, but we do the subject *and ourselves* no favors by approaching
the apparent mysteries of creativity with a near-shamanistic awe.
Language,
after all, is an inherently creative medium that we all learn to master,
one whose delights are governed by rules and conventions rather than
mysteries and enigmas. Our appreciation of a well-turned phrase is
enhanced, not diminished, by an understanding of the delicate twists and
agile turns that shape its development. "Exploding the Creativity Myth" is
a new monograph that celebrates the meta-conventions of these twists  and
turns, not by further burnishing the mystery of creativity, but by peering
behind the curtain to reveal its elegant arrangements of computational gears
and levers (with a special emphasis on the use of the World-Wide-Web).

As a sub-field of AI, Computational Creativity (CC) does not distinguish
itself through distinct algorithms or representations, but through its
goals and its philosophy. The primary goal of CC is to imbue computers
with
the kind of self-evaluating and self-filtering generative capabilities that
are deemed "creative" when observed in humans. The driving philosophy of CC
as a field frowns on "pastiche" -- the reverse-engineered exploration of a
sweet-spot of outputs in the distinctive style of a particular artist or
creator -- and on "mere" generation -- the formulaic, script-based
generation of well-formed outputs that are not subsequently evaluated or
critiqued, and which are never rejected as uninteresting by the system
itself. CC aims to develop generative software that can appreciate its own
outputs, and even be occasionally surprised by these outputs.

This talk will explore how the web can be used as a force-magnifier for
both theoretical and engineering progress in the field of computational
creativity. It will show how emerging CC technologies can be integrated
and
pooled to provide an architecture of creative web services that provide
important CC processes and services in an on-demand fashion. In this
vision
of a Creative Web, web services will provide creativity on tap to
third-party software applications; these services will include ideation
services (such as metaphor invention), composition services (such as
conceptual blending) and framing services (such as poetry generation, joke
generation, emotionally-grounded explanations and analyses, etc.).

Specifically, the talk will describe some existing services that have been
designed to instantiate this vision. These web services include the
interpretation and generation of affective metaphors, the analysis of
conceptual blends in both propositional and emotional terms, and the
rendering of metaphors and blends as novel poems that display some small
measure of insight and imagination.

* Tony Veale (PhD in Computer Science, TCD, 1996) is a researcher in 
computational creativity, metaphor and irony at the School of Computer 
Science and Informatics, UCD. He currently teaches computer science in 
UCD, in KAIST (the Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) 
South Korea, and in Fudan university, Shanghai. A sample chapter of 
"Exploding the Creativity Myth" can be downloaded from his web-site at
http://Afflatus.UCD.ie