Understanding and Quantifying Creativity in Lexical Composition

Polina Kuznetsova, Jianfu Chen, Yejin Choi

Abstract: Why do certain combinations of words such as “disadvantageous peace” or “metal to the petal” appeal to our minds as interesting expressions with a sense of creativity, while other phrases such as “quiet teenager”, or “geometrical base” not as much? We present statistical explorations to understand the characteristics of lexical compositions that give rise to the perception of being original, interesting, and at times even artistic. We first examine various correlates of perceived creativity based on information theoretic measures and the connotation of words, then present experiments based on supervised learning that give us further insights on how different aspects of lexical composition collectively contribute to the perceived creativity.