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I'm not an expert on haikus, but I'm guessing that in English, there's an accepted convention that each line in a haiku generally serves as an independent clause?

So:

    What she has given
    them is institutional 
    hagiography
is less "aesthetic" than:

    The story's not clear;
    Durer may have cooked it up
    just to do a nude

One extra layer of machine work could be to use NLP to filter out phrases in which the fifth/seventh syllable doesn't belong to a word that is not a noun. It would be interesting to see how much more it would filter/improve the auto-generated haikus.



Eh, I think the only somewhat-hard requirement is seventeen syllables, and even that is often waved in favor of aesthetics. Plus they really tend to work better in Japanese anyway.

Somewhat on-topic: Jack Kerouac made attempts to "Americanize" the haiku form a bit, which I always thought were pretty neat. I think they're collected in a book called (something like) Book of Haiku.

I still like your idea though :)


According to the American Haiku Society (yes, it exists), the syllable count is actually less important than including a seasonal word and a "cut" between two different sets of imagery. But that's a little harder to teach a bit of hack code to do... so...


the modern haiku

is no longer restricted

five seven five haa!




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