Automatic Generation of Literary Sentences in French

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a model for the automatic generation of literary sentences in French. Although there has been much recent effort directed towards automatic text generation in general, the generation of creative, literary sentences that is not restricted to a specific genre, which we approached in this work, is a difficult task that is not commonly treated in the scientific literature. In particular, our present model has not been previously applied to the generation of sentences in the French language. Our model was based on algorithms that we previously used to generate sentences in Spanish and Portuguese and on a new corpus, which we constructed and present here, consisting of literary texts in French, called MegaLitefr. Our automatic text generation algorithm combines language models, shallow parsing, the canned text method, and deep learning artificial neural networks. We also present a manual evaluation protocol that we propose and implemented to assess the quality of the artificial sentences generated by our algorithm, by testing if they fulfil four simple criteria. We obtained encouraging results from the evaluators for most of the desired features of our artificially generated sentences.