---
title: Generating Random Poems with Python
layout: post
image: /img/blog/buzzfeed.jpg
---
In this post, I will demonstrate how to generate random text using a few lines
of standard python and then progressively refine the output until it looks
poem-like.
If you would like to follow along with this post and run the code snippets
yourself, you can clone [my NLP repository](https://github.com/thallada/nlp/)
and run [the Jupyter
notebook](https://github.com/thallada/nlp/blob/master/edX%20Lightning%20Talk.ipynb).
You might not realize it, but you probably use an app everyday that can generate
random text that sounds like you: your phone keyboard.
Just by tapping the next suggested word over and over, you can generate text. So how does it work?
## Corpus
First, we need a **corpus**: the text our generator will recombine into new
sentences. In the case of your phone keyboard, this is all the text you've ever
typed into your keyboard. For our example, let's just start with one sentence:
```python
corpus = 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog'
```
## Tokenization
Now we need to split this corpus into individual **tokens** that we can operate
on. Since our objective is to eventually predict the next word from the previous
word, we will want our tokens to be individual words. This process is called
**tokenization**. The simplest way to tokenize a sentence into words is to split
on spaces:
```python
words = corpus.split(' ')
words
```
```python
['The', 'quick', 'brown', 'fox', 'jumps', 'over', 'the', 'lazy', 'dog']
```
## Bigrams
Now, we will want to create **bigrams**. A bigram is a pair of two words that
are in the order they appear in the corpus. To create bigrams, we will iterate
through the list of the words with two indices, one of which is offset by one:
```python
bigrams = [b for b in zip(words[:-1], words[1:])]
bigrams
```
```python
[('The', 'quick'),
('quick', 'brown'),
('brown', 'fox'),
('fox', 'jumps'),
('jumps', 'over'),
('over', 'the'),
('the', 'lazy'),
('lazy', 'dog')]
```
How do we use the bigrams to predict the next word given the first word?
Return every second element where the first element matches the **condition**:
```python
condition = 'the'
next_words = [bigram[1] for bigram in bigrams
if bigram[0].lower() == condition]
next_words
```
```python
['quick', 'lazy']
```
We have now found all of the possible words that can follow the condition "the"
according to our corpus: "quick" and "lazy".
(The quick) (quick brown) ... (the lazy) (lazy dog)
Either "quick" or "lazy" could be the next word.
## Trigrams and N-grams
We can partition our corpus into groups of threes too:
(The quick brown) (quick brown fox) ... (the lazy dog)
Or, the condition can be two words (`condition = 'the lazy'`):
(The quick brown) (quick brown fox) ... (the lazy dog)
These are called **trigrams**.
We can partition any **N** number of words together as **n-grams**.
## Conditional Frequency Distributions
Earlier, we were able to compute the list of possible words to follow a
condition:
```python
next_words
```
```python
['quick', 'lazy']
```
But, in order to predict the next word, what we really want to compute is what
is the most likely next word out of all of the possible next words. In other
words, find the word that occurred the most often after the condition in the
corpus.
We can use a **Conditional Frequency Distribution (CFD)** to figure that out! A
**CFD** can tell us: given a **condition**, what is **likelihood** of each
possible outcome.
This is an example of a CFD with two conditions, displayed in table form. It is
counting words appearing in a text collection (source: nltk.org).
Let's change up our corpus a little to better demonstrate the CFD:
```python
words = ('The quick brown fox jumped over the '
'lazy dog and the quick cat').split(' ')
print words
```
```python
['The', 'quick', 'brown', 'fox', 'jumped', 'over', 'the', 'lazy', 'dog', 'and', 'the', 'quick', 'cat']
```
Now, let's build the CFD. I use
[`defaultdicts`](https://docs.python.org/2/library/collections.html#defaultdict-objects)
to avoid having to initialize every new dict.
```python
from collections import defaultdict
cfd = defaultdict(lambda: defaultdict(lambda: 0))
for i in range(len(words) - 2): # loop to the next-to-last word
cfd[words[i].lower()][words[i+1].lower()] += 1
# pretty print the defaultdict
{k: dict(v) for k, v in dict(cfd).items()}
```
```python
{'and': {'the': 1},
'brown': {'fox': 1},
'dog': {'and': 1},
'fox': {'jumped': 1},
'jumped': {'over': 1},
'lazy': {'dog': 1},
'over': {'the': 1},
'quick': {'brown': 1},
'the': {'lazy': 1, 'quick': 2}}
```
So, what's the most likely word to follow `'the'`?
```python
max(cfd['the'])
```
```python
'quick'
```
Whole sentences can be the conditions and values too. Which is basically the way
[cleverbot](http://www.cleverbot.com/) works.
## Random Text
Lets put this all together, and with a little help from
[nltk](http://www.nltk.org/) generate some random text.
```python
import nltk
import random
TEXT = nltk.corpus.gutenberg.words('austen-emma.txt')
# NLTK shortcuts :)
bigrams = nltk.bigrams(TEXT)
cfd = nltk.ConditionalFreqDist(bigrams)
# pick a random word from the corpus to start with
word = random.choice(TEXT)
# generate 15 more words
for i in range(15):
print word,
if word in cfd:
word = random.choice(cfd[word].keys())
else:
break
```
Which outputs something like:
```
her reserve and concealment towards some feelings in moving slowly together .
You will shew
```
Great! This is basically what the phone keyboard suggestions are doing. Now how
do we take this to the next level and generate text that looks like a poem?
## Random Poems
Generating random poems is accomplished by limiting the choice of the next word
by some constraint:
* words that rhyme with the previous line
* words that match a certain syllable count
* words that alliterate with words on the same line
* etc.
## Rhyming
### Written English != Spoken English
English has a highly **nonphonemic orthography**, meaning that the letters often
have no correspondence to the pronunciation. E.g.:
> "meet" vs. "meat"
The vowels are spelled differently, yet they rhyme [^1].
So if the spelling of the words is useless in telling us if two words rhyme,
what can we use instead?
### International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
The IPA is an alphabet that can represent all varieties of human pronunciation.
* meet: /mit/
* meat: /mit/
Note that this is only the IPA transcription for only one **accent** of English.
Some English speakers may pronounce these words differently which could be
represented by a different IPA transcription.
## Syllables
How can we determine the number of syllables in a word? Let's consider the two
words "poet" and "does":
* "poet" = 2 syllables
* "does" = 1 syllable
The vowels in these two words are written the same, but are pronounced
differently with a different number of syllables.
Can the IPA tell us the number of syllables in a word too?
* poet: /ˈpoʊət/
* does: /ˈdʌz/
Not really... We cannot easily identify the number of syllables from those
transcriptions. Sometimes the transcriber denotes syllable breaks with a `.` or
a `'`, but sometimes they don't.
### Arpabet
The Arpabet is a phonetic alphabet developed by ARPA in the 70s that:
* Encodes phonemes specific to American English.
* Meant to be a machine readable code. It is ASCII only.
* Denotes how stressed every vowel is from 0-2.
This is perfect! Because of that third bullet, a word's syllable count equals
the number of digits in the Arpabet encoding.
### CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (CMUdict)
A large open source dictionary of English words to North American pronunciations
in Arpanet encoding. Conveniently, it is also in NLTK...
### Counting Syllables
```python
import string
from nltk.corpus import cmudict
cmu = cmudict.dict()
def count_syllables(word):
lower_word = word.lower()
if lower_word in cmu:
return max([len([y for y in x if y[-1] in string.digits])
for x in cmu[lower_word]])
print("poet: {}\ndoes: {}".format(count_syllables("poet"),
count_syllables("does")))
```
Results in:
```
poet: 2
does: 1
```
## Buzzfeed Haiku Generator
To see this in action, try out a haiku generator I created that uses Buzzfeed
article titles as a corpus. It does not incorporate rhyming, it just counts the
syllables to make sure it's [5-7-5](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku). You can view the full code
[here](https://github.com/thallada/nlp/blob/master/generate_poem.py).
Run it live at:
[http://mule.hallada.net/nlp/buzzfeed-haiku-generator/](http://mule.hallada.net/nlp/buzzfeed-haiku-generator/)
## Syntax-aware Generation
Remember these?
Mad Libs worked so well because they forced the random words (chosen by the
players) to fit into the syntactical structure and parts-of-speech of an
existing sentence.
You end up with **syntactically** correct sentences that are **semantically**
random. We can do the same thing!
### NLTK Syntax Trees!
NLTK can parse any sentence into a [syntax
tree](http://www.nltk.org/book/ch08.html). We can utilize this syntax tree
during poetry generation.
```python
from stat_parser import Parser
parsed = Parser().parse('The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.')
print parsed
```
Syntax tree output as an
[s-expression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-expression):
```
(S
(NP (DT the) (NN quick))
(VP
(VB brown)
(NP
(NP (JJ fox) (NN jumps))
(PP (IN over) (NP (DT the) (JJ lazy) (NN dog)))))
(. .))
```
```python
parsed.pretty_print()
```
And the same tree visually pretty printed in ASCII:
```
S
________________________|__________________________
| VP |
| ____|_____________ |
| | NP |
| | _________|________ |
| | | PP |
| | | ________|___ |
NP | NP | NP |
___|____ | ___|____ | _______|____ |
DT NN VB JJ NN IN DT JJ NN .
| | | | | | | | | |
the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog .
```
NLTK also performs [part-of-speech tagging](http://www.nltk.org/book/ch05.html)
on the input sentence and outputs the tag at each node in the tree. Here's what
each of those mean:
|**S** | Sentence |
|**VP** | Verb Phrase |
|**NP** | Noun Phrase |
|**DT** | Determiner |
|**NN** | Noun (common, singular) |
|**VB** | Verb (base form) |
|**JJ** | Adjective (or numeral, ordinal) |
|**.** | Punctuation |
Now, let's use this information to swap matching syntax sub-trees between two
corpora ([source for the generate
function](https://github.com/thallada/nlp/blob/master/syntax_aware_generate.py)).
```python
from syntax_aware_generate import generate
# inserts matching syntax subtrees from trump.txt into
# trees from austen-emma.txt
generate('trump.txt', word_limit=10)
```
```
(SBARQ
(SQ
(NP (PRP I))
(VP (VBP do) (RB not) (VB advise) (NP (DT the) (NN custard))))
(. .))
I do not advise the custard .
==============================
I do n't want the drone !
(SBARQ
(SQ
(NP (PRP I))
(VP (VBP do) (RB n't) (VB want) (NP (DT the) (NN drone))))
(. !))
```
Above the line is a sentence selected from a corpus of Jane Austen's *Emma*.
Below it is a sentence generated by walking down the syntax tree and finding
sub-trees from a corpus of Trump's tweets that match the same syntactical
structure and then swapping the words in.
The result can sometimes be amusing, but more often than not, this approach
doesn't fare much better than the n-gram based generation.
### spaCy
I'm only beginning to experiment with the [spaCy](https://spacy.io/) Python
library, but I like it a lot. For one, it is much, much faster than NLTK:
[https://spacy.io/docs/api/#speed-comparison](https://spacy.io/docs/api/#speed-comparison)
The [API](https://spacy.io/docs/api/) takes a little getting used to coming from
NLTK. It doesn't seem to have any sort of out-of-the-box solution to printing
out syntax trees like above, but it does do [part-of-speech
tagging](https://spacy.io/docs/api/tagger) and [dependency relation
mapping](https://spacy.io/docs/api/dependencyparser) which should accomplish
about the same. You can see both of these visually with
[displaCy](https://demos.explosion.ai/displacy/).
## Neural Network Based Generation
If you haven't heard all the buzz about [neural
networks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network), they are a
particular technique for [machine
learning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning) that's inspired by our
understanding of the human brain. They are structured into layers of nodes which
have connections to other nodes in other layers of the network. These
connections have weights which each node multiplies by the corresponding input
and enters into a particular [activation
function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activation_function) to output a single
number. The optimal weights for solving a particular problem with the network
are learned by training the network using
[backpropagation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpropagation) to perform
[gradient descent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradient_descent) on a
particular [cost function](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_function) that
tries to balance getting the correct answer while also
[generalizing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regularization_(mathematics)) the
network enough to perform well on data the network hasn't seen before.
[Long short-term memory
(LSTM)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_short-term_memory) is a type of
[recurrent neural network
(RNN)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recurrent_neural_network) (a network with
cycles) that can remember previous values for a short or long period of time.
This property makes them remarkably effective at a multitude of tasks, one of
which is predicting text that will follow a given sequence. We can use this to
continually generate text by inputting a seed, appending the generated output to
the end of the seed, removing the first element from the beginning of the seed,
and then inputting the seed again, following the same process until we've
generated enough text from the network ([paper on using RNNs to generate
text](http://www.cs.utoronto.ca/~ilya/pubs/2011/LANG-RNN.pdf)).
Luckily, a lot of smart people have done most of the legwork so you can just
download their neural network architecture and train it yourself. There's
[char-rnn](https://github.com/karpathy/char-rnn) which has some [really exciting
results for generating texts (e.g. fake
Shakespeare)](http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/). There's
also [word-rnn](https://github.com/larspars/word-rnn) which is a modified
version of char-rnn that operates on words as a unit instead of characters.
Follow [my last blog post on how to install TensorFlow on Ubuntu
16.04](/2017/06/20/how-to-install-tensorflow-on-ubuntu-16-04.html) and
you'll be almost ready to run a TensorFlow port of word-rnn:
[word-rnn-tensorflow](https://github.com/hunkim/word-rnn-tensorflow).
I plan on playing around with NNs a lot more to see what kind of poetry-looking
text I can generate from them.
---
[^1]:
Fun fact: They used to be pronounced differently in Middle English during
the invention of the printing press and standardized spelling. The [Great
Vowel Shift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift) happened
after, and is why they are now pronounced the same.