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