From Conceptual Mash-ups to Bad-ass Blends: A Robust Computational Model of Conceptual Blending.
Tony Veale · 2012
Conceptual blending is a cognitive phenomenon whose instances range from the humdrum to the pyrotechnical. Most remarkable of all is the ease with which humans regularly understand and produce complex blends. While this facility will doubtless elude our best efforts at computational modeling for some time to come, there are practical forms of conceptual blending that are amenable to computational exploitation right now. In this paper we introduce the notion of a conceptual mash-up, a robust form of blending that allows a computer to creatively re-use and extend its existing common-sense knowledge of a topic. We show also how a repository of such knowledge can be harvested automatically from the web, by targetting the casual questions that we pose to ourselves and to others every day. By acquiring its world knowledge from the questions of others, a computer can eventually learn to pose introspective (and creative) questions of its own. The Plumbing of Creative Thought We can think of comparisons as pipes that carry salient information from a source to a target concept. Some pipes are fatter than others, and thus convey more information: think of resonant metaphors or rich analogies that yield deeper meaning the more you look at them. By convention, pipes carry information in one direction only, from source to target. But creativity is no respecter of convention, and creative comparisons are sometimes a two-way affair. When the actor and writer Ethan Hawke was asked to write a profile of Kris Kristofferson for Rolling Stone magazine, Hawke had to create an imaginary star of his own to serve as an apt contemporary comparison. For Hawke, Brad Pitt is as meaningful a comparison as one can make, but even Pitt’s star power is but a dim bulb to that of Kristofferson when he shone most brightly in the 1970s. To communicate just how impressive the singer-actoractivist would have seemed to an audience in 1979, Hawke assembled the following Frankenstein-monster from the body of Pitt and other assorted star parts: “Imagine if Brad Pitt had written a No. 1 single for Amy Winehouse, was considered among the finest songwriters of his generation, had been a Rhodes