Pemuisi: A constraint satisfaction-based generator of topical Indonesian poetry

Abstract

Pemuisi is a poetry generation system that generates topical poems in Indonesian using a constraint satisfaction approach. It scans popular news websites for articles and extracts relevant keywords that are combined with various language resources such as templates and other slot fillers into lines of poetry. It then composes poems from these lines by satisfying a set of given constraints. A Turing Test-style evaluation and a detailed evaluation of three different configurations of the system was conducted through an online questionnaire with 180 respondents. The results showed that under the best scenario, 57% of the respondents thought that the generated poems were authored by humans, and that poems generated using the full set of constraints consistently measured better on all aspects than those generated using the other two configurations. The system is now available online as a web application.