Exploring Combinatorial Methods to Produce Sonnets: An Overview of the Oupoco Project

Thierry Poibeau

Abstract: In this paper, we describe Oupoco (l’Ouvroir de Poésie Combinatoire), a system producing new sonnets by recombining lines of poetry from existing sonnets, following an idea that Queneau described in his book Cent Mille Milliards de poèmes (A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, 1961). We first give the rationale of the project and review past experiments in poetry generation using combinatorial methods. We then demonstrate different outputs of our implementation (a Web site, a Twitter bot and a specifically developed device, called the Boîte à poésie) based on a corpus of 19th century French poetry. We describe how this project was an opportunity to work with artists and reach a new audience through the Boîte à poésie, and also through a video clip that frequently served as an introduction to the project. Our goal is to revive people’s interest in poetry by giving access to automatically produced sonnets through original and entertaining channels and devices.