Anti-Songs, Nonsense and Gibberish: Computer Generated Writing

Natural language - unruly, messy, ambiguous .. but also fun, inspiring and beautiful - is a challenge for computers to deconstruct and understand.

We're lucky to have Céline Boudier, known for her inspiring work on CodeforLife (http://codeforlife.education/) and the impressive NAO robot (https://www.ald.softbankrobotics.com/en/cool-robots/nao) at Aldebaran (Softbank Robotics Europe), introduce us to the surprisingly simple algorithms for generating realistic text.

http://photos3.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/7/a/5/8/600_459331320.jpeg

She'll explain and demonstrate:

• generating gibberish and half-gibberish texts with methods such as Markov Chains

• inverting texts to create "anti-songs"

• generating surreal poems

• a live demo of a talking NAO robot to enact some of the created text

Here's an example of half-gibberish, it works because it can't be completely random:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt4Dfa4fOEY

Flash Talk - We'll also have a shorter talk by Roger on how artistic and technical questions overlap when developing a lip-sync algorithm for ananimation about a therapist / patient relationship.