An expert system for the composition of formal Spanish poetry

The present paper presents an application that composes formal poetry in Sp anish in a semiautomatic interactive fashion. Automatic Spanish Poetry Expe rt and Rewriting Application (ASPERA) is a forward reasoning rule-based sys tem that obtains from the user basic style parameters and an intended messa ge; applies a knowledge-based pre-processor to select the most appropriate metric structure for the user's wishes; and, by intelligent adaptation of s elected examples from a corpus of verses, carries out a prose-to-poetry tra nslation of the given message. In the composition process, ASPERA combines natural language generation and CBR techniques to apply a set of constructi on heuristics obtained from formal literature on Spanish poetry. If the use r validates the poem draft presented by the system, the resulting verses ar e analysed and incorporated into the system data files. (C) 2001 Elsevier S cience B.V. All rights reserved.