A Minimal Computational Improviser Based on Oral Thought (2022)

Abstract: A prototype system for playing a minimal improvisational game with one or more human or computer players is discussed. The game, Chain Reaction, has players collectively build a chain of word pairs or solid compounds. With a basis in oral culture, it emphasizes memory and rapid improvisation. Chains are only locally coherent, so absurdity and humor increases during play. While it is trivial to develop a computer player using textual corpora and literature-culture concepts, our approach is unique in that we have grounded our work in the principles of oral culture according to Walter Ong, an early scholar of orature. We show how a simple computer model can be designed to embody many aspects of oral poetics as theorized by Ong, suggesting design directions for other work in oral improvisation and poetics. The opportunities for own our system’s further development include creating culturally specific automated players and situating play in different temporal, physical, and social contexts.

## introduction we developed a prototype computer system to play the game chain reaction. this is both a memory game and an oral improvisational game, and may be the simplest such game. the game is best introduced with an example. consider four players sitting in a circle, uttering the following: what exactly is "a thing"? like obscenity, we know it when we see it, or in this case, when we hear it. "a thing" is determined by consensus. it is whatever the group accepts as a suitable two-word phrase or compound word. in the example given, player 2 might have made a first move that involved uttering "post office plant" (an office plant being similar to a house plant, but for the office). this would have been a less obvious phrase, yet probably acceptable. even so, the continuations "office salad" and "office sky" would probably not have been accepted, even if the player could have spun a story about how there are such things (a salad stored in the office kitchen's fridge and consumed at one's desk or the view of the sky from one's office, for instance). if a player has to stop to explain the phrase, the game's continuity is broken, so such phrases are, at least, not good moves. new players usually find it surprisingly easy to recite long chains. there are reasons for this related to oral practices. a fundamental reason involves shared cultural and linguistic expectations. each word pair in the chain, after all, was almost instantly thought up by a player. ## why build computational models of oral improvisation? there has been intriguing work done to implement interactive improvisational games for language learning @xcite . one game, forced links, is even related to chain reaction, in that it involves the formation of word chains, although not a word at a time. our work differs from this project because it does not have any goal extrinsic to the game itself, and because it is strongly based on oral practices and principles. oral cultures and thought encompass a broad span of human history prior to the development of writing and the establishment of cultures grounded in literacy. aspects of oral thought persist today, as do new oral practices that are now situated in a culture suffused with manuscript, print, and electronic practices. a prominent and innovative one, for instance, is freestyle rap. there are many approaches to understanding complex phenomena such as orality. we chose the epistemological approach of developing a computational model. this allows us to explore the nature and consequence of orality in three distinct ways. first, in the process of building the system we can discover constituent elements of oral thought in accordance with the computational-imperative principle: "any model of human intelligence should introduce only computational capabilities that enable observed behaviors without enabling unobserved behaviors." @xcite . second, we can examine the system's functions and connections as a map towards understanding the functions and structures of orality in action. last, by engaging with the built system, we can explore surprises and unexpected (yet sometimes positive) behavior, which can be used as further input to generate new questions to explore. there have been remarkable systems for oral improvisation and poetics, including a physical robot which engages in an agonistic, improvised singing practice, bertsolaritza, that is traditional in the basque country. @xcite this "bertsobot" does a complex sort of improvisation and is a multimodal system with an elaborate architecture, as opposed to the system we describe. the interface is speech-based. however the underlying generation of verses, based on a vector-space model of sentences, is not based on oral principles. the way language is characterized by researchers (as "sentences" rather than "utterances") indicates a literate-culture orientation in the system's design and development. bertsobot's sentence selection is also based on a corpus that consists of some preexisting, transcribed bertsos, but mostly of text from a newspaper, berria -a literate, written source. more recently, a physical robot that can engage in freestyle rap battles, shimon, has been developed @xcite . again, this is an elaborate system that multimodally performs a complex type of improvisation. shimon was trained on a database of rap lyrics (and, in a different condition, metal music lyrics), but these lyrics were composed rather than improvised. researchers studied flow and drew on how-to books about rapping, but it not clear that the project was informed by the ethnographic literature on freestyle or a significant neuroscience study @xcite . both bertsobot and shimon were engineered to perform optimally and to be evaluated positively by people. they were developed with clear awareness of bertsolaritza and freestyle rap. still, the language generation in these systems did not seem completely anchored to any explicit and general theory of oral poetics. while our project may seem trivial by comparison to these very elaborate ones, it does have such a basis. and by focusing on a minimal improvisational situation, and paring down our system to its essence, we hope to show what oral poetic design principles apply most widely. ## the obvious approach misses the point it would be simple enough to download a large textual corpus, create a list of word pairs from this data, then sample uniformly to create an automated player for chain reaction. the player so constructed could be given a higher or lower temperature parameter so that it utters more common or more unusual words to continue the chain. this player, however, would lack the nuance humans will have when playing, and would have no basis in the principles of orature or cognitive operational constraints. human speakers have not perfectly memorized libraries of digital and digitalized text, and even if they had, speech and writing represent different registers. a corpus will not represent how the a language is spoken unless it consists entirely of accurate transcripts, given the many differences between speech and writing noted and theorized by ong, halliday (1989) and others (e.g. @xcite . these have often been automatically distinguished using computational linguistics systems (e.g. @xcite . additionally, humans do not uniformly sample from a fixed database of possible word pairs or compound words in their minds. chain continuations are uttered based on common speech, idioms and expressions, individual backgrounds and history, cultural backgrounds, current events, the physical setting of the game, previous conversations players have had with each other, and so on. in addition to factors that are not conscious, explicit decisionmaking plays a role. players may sometimes choose uncommon continuations as "curve-balls" to make the game more interesting. and finally, the store of pairs within the mind may be large, but certainly is constrained. ## crt, a bot to play chain reaction with humans chain reaction time (crt) is a simple prototype system, developed in python, for playing chain reaction. in developing crt we were not interested in providing a surrogate social environment and having a single human player use the computer as a partner in this game. the point of developing crt, and any future automated players of games like chain reaction, is to be able to add these computer players to groups of several humans and make the dynamics of a multi-player game even more unusual and fun. ## principles of oral poetics as they apply to chain reaction and crt in orality and literacy, walter ong outlines nine unique characteristics that distinguish primary oral thought processes from textually based cognition @xcite . while ong is certainly not the last word on orality -he is, rather, the first major scholar and theorist of it -we believe his principles remain critical to understanding oral improvisation and oral culture. our selection of chain reaction and development of crt to play it embodies these characteristics as follows. ## reflections on play with crt an example transcript of a play session with two human players and crt is given in appendix a. we have not undertaken any formal evaluation of crt, but can share some reflections based on our informal participation in and observation of the game when crt participates. the crt system does work and can participate in play with human players. including one or more computerized players in a group of human players can inflect gameplay in an interesting way, as the computer player is able to participate, but in a way that is sometimes noticeably nonhuman. its pace of recitation is unusually regular. it is capable of forming good continuations, but currently, not ones that are influenced by pairs earlier in the chain or by the human context. generally, the current system's ability to form continuations is not currently near a human level, so games often end with the automated players unable to find continuations that human players have in mind. the limited but noticeable success of crt proves that even a simple system can embody almost all major the aspects of oral poetics as theorized by ong. it highlights the aspects that are most challenging to model, including those that rely on physical, temporal, and social contexts of play. we hope that this design directions for other work in oral improvisation and poetics, specifically, pointing out (1) what aspects of orature are easy to model and should be implemented in related systems, and (2) helping to show what aspects are more challenging and should be a focus for future research.