Textual Coherence in a Verse-Maker Robot

Abstract

The Bertsobot project aims to develop an autonomous robot capable of composing and playing traditional Basque impromptu verses-bertsoak. The system should be able to construct novel verses according to given constraints on rhyme and meter, and to perform it in public. The Bertsobot project, at the intersection of Autonomous Robotics, Natural Language Generation and Human Robot Interaction, works to model the human abilities that collaborate in the process that enables a verse-maker to produce impromptu verses. This paper provides a general overview of the system, specially focusing on the description and evaluation of different semantic similarity methods for predicting the textual coherence of the generated verses. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.