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SUMMARY:Game of Tropes: Exploring the Placebo Effect in Computational Crea
 tivity - Tony Veale\, University College Dublin
DTSTART:20151007T150000Z
DTEND:20151007T160000Z
UID:TALK61257@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Tamara Polajnar
DESCRIPTION:Twitter has proven itself a rich and varied source of language
  data for linguistic analysis. For Twitter is more than a popular new chan
 nel for social interaction in language\; in many ways it constitutes a who
 le new genre of text\, as users adapt to its new limitations (140 characte
 r messages) and to its novel conventions such as retweeting and hash-taggi
 ng. But Twitter presents an opportunity of another kind to computationally
 -minded researchers of language\, a generative opportunity to study how al
 gorithmic systems might exploit linguistic tropes to compose novel\, conci
 se and re-tweetable texts of their own. In this talk I present an evaluati
 on of one such system\, a Twitterbot named @MetaphorMagnet that packages i
 ts own metaphors\, mini-narratives and ironic observations as pithy tweets
 . Moreover\, I shall use @MetaphorMagnet\, and the idea of Twitterbots mor
 e generally\, to explore the relationship of linguistic containers to thei
 r contents\, to understand the extent to which human readers fill these co
 ntainers with their own meanings\, to see meaning in the outputs of genera
 tive systems where none was ever intended. I will present an evaluation of
  this "placebo" effect by asking human raters to judge the comprehensibili
 ty\, novelty and aptness of texts tweeted by simple and sophisticated Twit
 terbots.
LOCATION:FW26\, Computer Laboratory
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