Modelling Creativity: Identifying Key Components through a Corpus-Based Approach

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive model of creativity by analyzing language in academic literature, identifying key components that form an ontology useful for evaluating and understanding creative behavior across domains.

Contribution

It introduces a novel corpus-based method to identify and cluster key components of creativity, creating a multi-perspective ontology for modeling creative practice.

Findings

Identified 14 key components of creativity from academic texts.

Clustered components into themes revealing diverse aspects of creativity.

Applied components in case studies to evaluate computational creativity.

Abstract

Creativity is a complex, multi-faceted concept encompassing a variety of related aspects, abilities, properties and behaviours. If we wish to study creativity scientifically, then a tractable and well-articulated model of creativity is required. Such a model would be of great value to researchers investigating the nature of creativity and in particular, those concerned with the evaluation of creative practice. This paper describes a unique approach to developing a suitable model of how creative behaviour emerges that is based on the words people use to describe the concept. Using techniques from the field of statistical natural language processing, we identify a collection of fourteen key components of creativity through an analysis of a corpus of academic papers on the topic. Words are identified which appear significantly often in connection with discussions of the concept. Using a measure of lexical similarity to help cluster these words, a number of distinct themes emerge, which collectively contribute to a comprehensive and multi-perspective model of creativity. The components provide an ontology of creativity: a set of building blocks which can be used to model creative practice in a variety of domains. The components have been employed in two case studies to evaluate the creativity of computational systems and have proven useful in articulating achievements of this work and directions for further research.