Experiments with free concept generation in Divago

This paper presents a set of experiments we carried out recently with Divago, a system we have been developing and which has, as an underlying motivation, the goal of being a computational model of creativity. This model is expected to be able to generate novel concepts out of previous knowledge. Here we show its behaviour with a large dataset constructed independently by other researchers consisting of over 170 nouns. Each noun is represented with a syntax that is equivalent to the one adopted for Divago. We apply a two step experimentation procedure, which starts by “training” the system with “preferred outcomes” and then allowing it to do free generation, constrained by the pragmatic goal of a given query. We evaluate and make a short discussion on the results under well defined criteria of novelty and usefulness.