Computational generation of slogans

Abstract

In advertising, slogans are used to enhance the recall of the advertised product by consumers and to distinguish it from others in the market. Creating effective slogans is a resource-consuming task for humans. In this paper, we describe a novel method for automatically generating slogans, given a target concept (e.g., car) and an adjectival property to express (e.g., elegant) as input. Additionally, a key component in our approach is a novel method for generating nominal metaphors, using a metaphor interpretation model, to allow generating metaphorical slogans. The method for generating slogans extracts skeletons from existing slogans. It then fills a skeleton in with suitable words by utilizing multiple linguistic resources (such as a repository of grammatical relations, and semantic and language models) and genetic algorithms to optimize multiple objectives such as semantic relatedness, language correctness, and usage of rhetorical devices. We evaluate the metaphor and slogan generation methods by running crowdsourced surveys. On a five-point Likert scale, we ask online judges to evaluate whether the generated metaphors, along with three other metaphors generated using different methods, highlight the intended property. The slogan generation method is evaluated by asking crowdsourced judges to rate generated slogans from five perspectives: (1) how well is the slogan related to the topic, (2) how correct is the language of the slogan, (3) how metaphoric is the slogan, (4) how catchy, attractive, and memorable is it, and (5) how good is the slogan overall. Similarly, we evaluate existing expert-made slogans. Based on the evaluations, we analyze the method and provide insights regarding existing slogans. The empirical results indicate that our metaphor generation method is capable of producing apt metaphors. Regarding the slogan generator, the results suggest that the method has successfully produced at least one effective slogan for every evaluated input.