Lexical Combinatorial Creativity with “Gastronaut”

Combinatorial creativity involves the creation of new ideas (and, if realized, artefacts) by exploring atypical combinations of familiar ideas. In this paper we explore the relationship between word-level creativity and artefact-level creativity in a computational system dubbed “Gastronaut” that explores the food domain. Cookery is both a paradigm example, and a metaphor, for combinatorial creativity, since creativity can be viewed as the insightful combination of ingredients, abstract or otherwise, to generate a novel artefact. Our model uses lexical descriptions for generated ingredient combinations and a corpus approach to assess H-Creativity or P-Creativity values to reflect the degree of novelty involved in each combination. We argue that P-Creativity and H-Creativity must be seen as a graded rather than binary phenomena.