Microsoft's Chinese chatbot inspired by images to write poetry

Microsoft's chatbot Xiaoice does a lot more than other bots. She has presented the weather on live TV and now even composed a book of poems. Xiaoice has written 12 million of poems in fact. In a paper on arXiv, researchers from Microsoft, National Taiwan University, and the University of Montreal explained that all text Xiaoice wrote is inspired by images. "Given an image, we first extract a few keywords representing objects and sentiments perceived from the image. These keywords are then expanded to related ones based on their associations in human written poems. Finally, verses are generated gradually from the keywords using recurrent neural networks trained on existing poems," according to the paper's abstract.