Computational Approaches to Linguistic Creativity for Real World Applications

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in computational linguistic creativity, a research field at the boundary between many disciplines including natural language processing, linguistics, psychology, cognitive sciences and humanities. Even though the state-of-the-art in this field has been striding forward in the last decade, real-world applications of computational linguistic creativity are still uncommon. For comparison, computer-enhanced productivity software is significantly augmenting the skills of both casual users and professionals in other areas, such as image and signal processing. In this thesis, we advocate three main points that computational linguistic creativity should address to achieve a higher state of maturity and demonstrate its full potential: 1) the focus on real-world applications, in which state-of-the- art technology can be leveraged to offer solutions with a practical utility for end users; 2) the adoption of an interactive paradigm in which technology collaborates with users to enhance their creativity instead of attempting to replace it; 3) the investigation of the explorative dimension of creativity, as a means to achieve the two previous points by offering users richer ways of interaction and more powerful tools that can solve a larger class of problems.We present three applications that we designed and developed to address these points: 1) a system for the interactive construction of creative names designed as a support tool for copywriters; 2) a platform for the generation of memory tips for second language learning; 3) an explorative and general-purpose framework for creative sentence generation with the potential to be deployed in a wide range of settings, including advertisement, education and entertainment. All these platforms leverage state-of-the-art technology to deliver creative results with the potential to be useful for end users. We demonstrate this point through three different evaluations, in which we show that 1) the generated neologisms are appealing and successful, and that 2) the sentences that we generate have many of the qualities of successful slogans used for advertisement and 3) they are effective mnemonic devices when used as memory aids for second language learning.