Exploiting Readymades in Linguistic Creativity: A System Demonstration of the Jigsaw Bard

Tony Veale, Yanfen Hao

Abstract: Large lexical resources, such as corpora and databases of Web ngrams, are a rich source of pre-fabricated phrases that can be reused in many different contexts. However, one must be careful in how these resources are used, and noted writers such as George Orwell have argued that the use of canned phrases encourages sloppy thinking and results in poor communication. Nonetheless, while Orwell prized home-made phrases over the readymade variety, there is a vibrant movement in modern art which shifts artistic creation from the production of novel artifacts to the clever reuse of readymades or objets trouves. We describe here a system that makes creative reuse of the linguistic readymades in the Google ngrams. Our system, the Jigsaw Bard, thus owes more to Marcel Duchamp than to George Orwell. We demonstrate how textual readymades can be identified and harvested on a large scale, and used to drive a modest form of linguistic creativity.