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.