Training a neural net to generate British placenames | Hacker News Reader

Training a neural net to generate British placenames

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90 pointstriplesec42 comments

There's a subset of Weird Twitter people from the USA who riff on weird UK placenames and sayings every now and then. I frequently have to remind myself how odd they must sound to an outsider.

@arr and @livestock put together the "Wobbingpool Police Incident Report" on Something Awful a while back which is a nice example: http://www.somethingawful.com/news/wobbingpool-police-report...

If you're not British or a serious Anglophile it can be hard to believe that Nempnett Thrubwell or Newton Poppleford are real places.

We used to drive to Portishead to listen to Portishead.

Years ago, I heard what I thought was the name of a play, "Western Super Mayor" was opening in the UK. A bit of checking and it turned out that it's the town of, Weston-super-Mare; sort of a Latinized version of "Whatevertown-upon-Rivername."

I'm pretty sure that if you said, "Weston-super-Mare" to a random collection of Americans, virtually none of them would even recognize what you were saying.

> "Whatevertown-upon-Rivername." "Upon-sea", actually, but yes.

Ah, to clear confusion, here's some bits on Upon:

Kingston upon Thames Newcastle upon Tyne Stratford upon Avon Berwick upon Tweed

These are all rivers.

Here's a cheat sheet to decipher British names:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_forms_in_pla...

Usually translates to something mundane. Weston literally means "West Town".

EDIT: Got confused by parent wording - upon is used for the river but the above comment is correct: Weston super mare means "Weston upon sea", not that upon is reserved for seas

Oh they're seas?! I always (wrongly I guess) assumed that they were all rivers, like Tine, Avon, that kind of thing.

No that's right. Parent meant "Weston super mare" literally means "Weston upon sea", not that Upon is reserved for seas.

Oh, I'm a goober, thanks for the explanation.

I think that's where John Cleese is from, so this American knows it.

I must be one of a few Americans who know it because it's an interesting name, but had no idea Cleese was from there until I read your comment just now. Very interesting.

John Cleese, the original Western Super Mayor.

Weston-super-mud (Weston-super-mare has mudflats)

Great Snoring and Little Snoring always cracked me up too. They're lovely sleepy little villages.

Dallas is also a rather small sleepy village in Moray.

I believe there may be another one somewhere.

Middle Wallop. Upper Wallop and Lower Wallop -- hopefully not too firmly.

Some more English place names.

Nasty: https://binged.it/2tnXxmm

Ugley: https://binged.it/2eCIKSF

Matching Tye: https://binged.it/2gQYodA

Barton in the Beans: https://binged.it/2todjh8

Benny Hill: https://binged.it/2tnXmaT

Crackpot: https://binged.it/2gQUCRu

Blubberhouses: https://binged.it/2gReunu

Westward Ho!

Only British place name with an exclamation mark. The village is named from the book, not the other way around, and was developed to cash in on tourism inspired by the book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westward_Ho!

Marsh Gibbon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_Gibbon

I'm partial to Upper and Lower Slaughter myself.

Mellon Udrigle is one of my favourite Socttish place names.

Eeesh that's a lot of Stoke.

Place names in Britain are extremely arbitrary and I wonder how this impacts. Some of these don't feel quite "right".

Here's an interesting story that explains my thinking:

There's an area of Salford called Irlams o'th Height. This used to be called the Height as it was elevated over the Irwell.

There was a family in the 18th century who owned a pub on the Height. This was the Irlam family.

The pub, officially the Park Horse, was locally known as "Irlam's". It was literally "Irlam's on the Height".

As the area grew, especially during the industrial revolution, the entire area was just called "Irlam's on the Height". This has continued to this day - nobody really questions it.

There's also an area in Salford called Irlam. This is on the opposite side of Salford and has nothing to do with Irlam's pub (perhaps except that may be where the family name originated). The area was called Irwellham - a hamlet on the river Irwell.

Salford, to finish, I think is naturally due to a ford. Probably a ford in one of the rivers, perhaps the Irwell again, since Salford emcompassed much of what is now Greater Manchester.

Long winded story out of the way, to generate British sounding names, take local natural landmarks/typically British surnames and suffix with "ham", "ton", "chester". Must warn - many will probably exist!

Imagine some kind of AI that generates place names by simulating entire histories, Dwarf Fortress style.

Seems to me you'd have a far more interesting program than a mere place name generator.

There's a field of study called toponymy, the study of place names. Perhaps it contains insights that could have great impact on place name generation.

There's a significant subset of Americans for whom in their mind Britain looks a lot like Narnia. Frankly the preponderance of cutesy Saxon village names that look and sound a lot like these are part of the reason.

That and the existence of people like Jacob Rees-Mogg.

It's a little more sinister when you realize how much money, land, and power rests on those frilly, fanciful notions. It's not just Americans, but plenty of British people who fall for the illusion to some degree, much as many Americans buy into "Exceptionalism" or some flavor of nationalism.

Often the debate ends up centered around the monarchy, and then dies a quiet death when the turkeys in the HoL fail to support the notion of Thanksgiving.

Here's a screenshot of all the local by elections held in the UK on Thursday to compare for accuracy:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DFMAyTLXsAAqM16.jpg

Pretty good.

This reminds me of a tremendously unhelpful idea that keeps circling my brain: A bot that trains a neural net using code comments from a specific GitHub project. The bot then replaces all the comments in the project with those produced by the neural net, then sends in a pull request.

You could also use different training data, perhaps mix in some Mills & Boon.

Bonus points if it only adds comments to previously un-commented sections, especially ones that look complicated.

These are clearly English place names and bear no relation to the rest of Britain.

There are several that are clearly Welsh. Possibly a couple that sound Scottish, though that's tricky to tell without confirmation bias...

You get a few Welsh sounding place names in Scotland that are actually from the Old Brythonic/Ancient British that was the forerunner of Welsh - Penicuik (Pen Y Cog) outside Edinburgh being one.

I don't see anything on the list that looks Gaelic, Norse or the old weird Pictish names...

I did this with a list of 10,000 cannabis strain names scraped from a seed database, have had results running on a twitter bot: https://twitter.com/high_learning_

my favorites so far: 'Grape Meth', 'Bitch Kush', 'Critical Burple', 'Space Hell'

Batchington Crunnerton

sounds like you found an actor

Lost it at "Fuckley."

For me it was Fapton

My connection is too poor to actually read the article: Can it generate welsh (Compound? Not sure) names like the classic "llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch"

Someone with no life could scale this out to all countries (plus generate legit street names and person names).

You'd get an universal fake-address-generator to rule them all.

Dull - twinned with Boring, Oregon - can be found in scotland.

On inspection of the examples, perhaps even Dickensian.

Not to be a downer but put this one under the category of "it's not AI if a character based ngram model can do it".

But fun regardless of the hype-y AI title.

This not only has a name, it has a Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

> As soon as AI successfully solves a problem, the problem is no longer a part of AI.

snip

> Douglas Hofstadter expresses the AI effect concisely by quoting Tesler's Theorem: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."

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