What’s Creative About Sentences? A Computational Approach to Assessing Creativity in a Sentence Generation Task

ABSTRACT Evaluating creativity of verbal responses or texts is a challenging task due to psychometric issues associated with subjective ratings and the peculiarities of textual data. We explore an approach to objectively assess the creativity of responses in a sentence generation task to 1) better understand what language-related aspects are valued by human raters and 2) further advance the developments toward automating creativity evaluations. Over the course of two prior studies, participants generated 989 four-word sentences based on a four-letter prompt with the instruction to be creative. We developed an algorithm that scores each sentence on eight different metrics including 1) general word infrequency, 2) word combination infrequency, 3) context-specific word uniqueness, 4) syntax uniqueness, 5) rhyme, 6) phonetic similarity, and similarity of 7) sequence spelling and 8) semantic meaning to the cue. The text metrics were then used to explain the averaged creativity ratings of eight human raters. We found six metrics to be significantly correlated with the human ratings, explaining a total of 16% of their variance. We conclude that the creative impression of sentences is partly driven by different aspects of novelty in word choice and syntax, as well as rhythm and sound, which are amenable to objective assessment.