[themadstork]

Hey, I'm one of the creators of this -- I trained the LSTMs that wrote the computer generated segments in this film. The ballet choreography was generated with a context-free grammar, because I couldn't find enough material to make a ballet choreography LSTM.

Here's our film from last year, Sunspring, which was written entirely by an LSTM trained on science fiction screenplays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LY7x2Ihqjmc

It's worth noting that this year I used subtitle files rather than screenplays to train our LSTMs, so we only had dialogue rather than dialogue + action descriptions. The Ars Technica article explains everything.

[krylon]

Just wanted to say, that this was a very strange and very interesting experience, and now I'm excited to see what might come out of such experiments a few years down the road!

[rhcom2]

I'm incredibly interested in the ballet part, what was it trained on? Any more info on that part?

[themadstork]

Yeah, I simply ingested words in French from a few online ballet dictionaries into a JSON object, and used a recursive context-free grammar to generate (generally) grammatically correct sentences. The result was a mixture of English and French because the dancer (Sarah Hay) requested that I add a few words of her choice in English as well.

Here's some information about context-free grammars: http://www.decontextualize.com/teaching/rwet/recursion-and-c...

[rhcom2]

The dictionary gives you the terms but how do you get the rules (like S -> NP VP) to combine them? Or were the rules the same as the English language just with the verbs from the ballet dictionary? Thank you for the link also.