Data-Driven Creativity Enhancement Through Word Association

Writing creative stories from a blank page is a challenging task, particularly in the modern game industry where dozens of writers can contribute to the stories and settings of a constantly evolving artificial world. We introduce a system which recommends interesting, evocative, and thematically coherent words to help creators write thematically connected stories. We combine principles from human creativity enhancement and computational creativity to build a creative assistant based on word association research. We show that careful corpus selection, filtering based on emotional sentiment, and promoting remote associations through paragraph scale segmentation can produce recommendations that promote creative goals better than alternative word association algorithms according to our creative word indicators.