Divergent semantic integration (DSI): Extracting creativity from narratives with distributional semantic modeling.
Dan R Johnson1, James C Kaufman2, Brendan S Baker3
1Department of Cognitive and Behavioral Science, Washington and Lee University, Parmly Hall, 204 W. Washington St, Lexington, VA, 24450, USA. johnsondr@wlu.edu.
Behavior Research Methods
|October 17, 2022
Summary
We created a new way to measure creativity in writing called divergent semantic integration (DSI). Our BERT-based model accurately predicts human creativity ratings, showing promise for diverse writers.
Area of Science:
- Computational Linguistics
- Psychology of Creativity
- Natural Language Processing
Background:
- Creativity is a complex cognitive process.
- Measuring creativity in written narratives presents challenges.
- Distributional semantics offers tools to analyze word meaning in context.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce and operationalize divergent semantic integration (DSI) as a component of narrative creativity.
- To compare computational models for assessing DSI.
- To validate the best model against human creativity judgments.
Main Methods:
- Integrated creativity theory and distributional semantics.
- Developed and compared six computational models for DSI.
- Utilized Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) for word embeddings.
- Evaluated models across nine studies with over 3500 narratives.
Main Results:
- The BERT-based DSI model demonstrated strong predictive power, explaining up to 72% of variance in human creativity ratings.
- BERT DSI scores achieved high agreement with human raters, including experts and non-experts.
- DSI scores showed generalizability across diverse ethnic backgrounds and English language proficiencies.
Conclusions:
- DSI offers a novel, computationally tractable measure of narrative creativity.
- BERT-based DSI provides a reliable and valid operationalization of creativity.
- This approach facilitates cross-disciplinary research on creativity and its measurement.
Keywords:
Creativity assessmentCreativity in writingDistributional semantic modelingNarrativesNatural language processingMore Related Videos
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