Shall I Compare Thee to a Machine-Written Sonnet? An Approach to Algorithmic Sonnet Generation

Abstract: We provide an approach for generating beautiful poetry. Our sonnet-generation algorithm includes several novel elements that improve over the state of the art, leading to metrical, rhyming poetry with many human-like qualities. These novel elements include in-line punctuation, part of speech restrictions, and more appropriate training corpora. Our work is the winner of the 2018 PoetiX Literary Turing Test Award for computer-generated poetry.