The AIIDE-17 Workshop on Experimental AI in Games WS-17-19 Poetic Sound Similarity Vectors Using Phonetic Features Allison Parrish Interactive Telecommunications Program New York University New York, NY 10003
[email protected] Abstract of phonetic similarity has long been considered a criterion for classifying a text as “poetic,” and researchers have de- A procedure that uses phonetic transcriptions of words to pro- ployed quantification of phonetic similarity for a wide range duce a continuous vector-space model of phonetic sound sim- ilarity is presented. The vector dimensions of words in the of statistical analyses of literary style and quality (Skinner model are calculated using interleaved phonetic feature bi- 1941; Altmann 1964; Roazzi, Dowker, and Bryant 1993; grams, a novel method that captures similarities in sound that Kao and Jurafsky 2012). are difficult to model with orthographic or phonemic informa- The research presented in this paper concerns not just how tion alone. Measurements of similarity between items in the to quantify phonetic similarity in a text, but also how to char- resulting vector space are shown to perform well on estab- acterize and manipulate it. Inspired by recent results in vec- lished tests for predicting phonetic similarity. Additionally, tor representations of semantics based on word distribution a number of applications of vector arithmetic and nearest- (Bengio et al. 2003, Mikolov, Yih, and Zweig 2013, etc.) neighbor search are presented, demonstrating potential uses which allow for semantic relationships to be expressed us- of the vector space in experimental poetry and procedural content generation. ing vector operations, I present a method for embedding text in a continuous vector space such that stretches of text that are phonetically similar are represented by similar vectors.