Portmanteau Generator | Hacker News Reader

Portmanteau Generator

punchlinedesign.net

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I had my doubts going in, but:

"Pointless" "Meeting" -> Morondezvous

I think it just found the perfect word for my daily life.

You've just added value to my life! I will use this word with great pleasure.

Also: "programateurish" - might come in handy for code reviews?

An excellent way to invent new Pokémon: element + animal

    "electric"+"rat":

    - dynamole
    - hydroach
    - electrodent

Electrodent is perfect for Pikachu, but, unsurprisingly, much less appealing.

This is cool. I entered Bird + Word and got:

  - beak speak
  - lexicon swan
  - ornithology terminology

And to cap it off, the portmentau of spellican!

The results are just incredible. The depth of the project is very deep. Case in point, chess+clock yields hourglasker (hourglass & Lasker). Lasker was a German chess champion, well known in chess circles but the average person would have no idea who he is.

I wonder if this is using wikipedia or dbpedia to walk a graph and find words to stick together. That's the only way I could think of doing this.

Nope, the paper says it's just using the FastText word embedding: https://nips2018creativity.github.io/doc/entendrepreneur.pdf which is just a particularly well-done word2vec: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.09405.pdf 'Lasker' and 'chess' no doubt co-occur quite strongly in their Internet corpus.

On the other hand, it comes up with "Beagle" and "Labrador" as synonyms of "cat". Color me unimpressed.

This seems like something that has been done before, and the fact the paper has no references indicates to me that the author maybe didn't do background research. While [0] is different, I could have sworn I've seen a paper which discussed creating puns in this fashion.

[0] http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W05-1614

Maybe you saw https://llamasandmystegosaurus.blogspot.com/2017/05/alpha.ht... a year or two ago which does something similar in generating rhyming definitions, also using a word2vec approach.

fasttext and word2vec only encode contextual similarity, they're not meant to generate synonyms.

So, you agree with me then. You can't say "What do you call a sleepy cat? A /grumbea-gle/ (grumpy-beagle)!" It's a portmanteau, sure, but it is not really even close to the input. Using word2vec here is probably wrong, or should have different pruning for word variance. It's a flaw of the technique and choices of the author.

> On the other hand, it comes up with "Beagle" and "Labrador" as synonyms of "cat". Color me unimpressed.

'It doesn't matter whether a cat has floppy ears or yellow fur so long as it catches mice.'

Perhaps it's thinking in Ron Swanson terms:

"Any dog under fifty pounds is a cat and cats are useless."

>Lasker was a German chess champion

That doesn't quite do him justice - Emanuel Lasker was world champion for 27 (!) years, 1894-1921, a record not likely ever to be surpassed. And a mathematician (e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laskerian_ring ) and fine writer. In fact I learnt to play from Lasker's Manual of Chess. It's very poetic in places, e.g.

On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in the checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite.

edit: I guess you knew that if you were trying chess + clock hehe.

That's really cool, but as I described above, my experience was different. The phoneme matching is really impressive but the word selection functionality seems pretty weak.

I had better luck with "large" and "cat" which gave me "colossalot", as in "colossal ocelot", which is a real winner.

However, I don't want to dismiss the hard work that went into this tool, despite my criticisms. It's very, very cool.

Well... Time to change careers. A "sex" and "travel" blog called "exploregasm" needs to exist.

Seeding with “tiger mom” didn’t disappoint:

  - galigator (gal/alligator)
  - croctuplets (croc/octuplets)
  - Pumather-in-law (puma/mother-in-law)

Source code: https://github.com/jonadsimon/entendrepreneur-web/blob/maste...

Paper (just 2 pages): https://nips2018creativity.github.io/doc/entendrepreneur.pdf

Anyway... here is a 100,000+word portmanteau for your entertainment https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVn2PZGZxaI (no phonemes)

Againyway... that's odd https://www.punchlinedesign.net/pun_generator/%21+%21

dunnope https://www.punchlinedesign.net/pun_generator/%3F+!

whenyway suckordingly anyhowever whenyhow https://www.punchlinedesign.net/pun_generator/!+.

"existential" + "angst" yields some great results, including despairitual (despair/spiritual), tormentological (torment/ontological), and sartrevail (sartre/travail)

Seeded it with fish and plane because they were the first two words I could think of.

"tarmackerel"

I am complete.

Oh, I've got another one:

Britain and exit yields: Briturn - I think the signs have spoken

Very cool and impressive project. "portmanteau" + "website" yields "internetymology".

Rockstar + Developer yields the rather delightful "insomniactor".

In this friendustry informat is the mewsage.

Suggestion: integrate this on a domain name suggestion service.

As far as I can tell, it already serves that purpose beautifully in its current state :P

For sure. Showing what .com is available would be nice, though.

My favorite:

timid + programmer => softwary (software/wary)

This is internet gold

spaghetti + mom yields:

grandpasta mommytball spagheteenager spagheteen fettuccineice

I think I found my next online nickname: "grandpasta flash"

A think the right way to test such a tool is to start with a list of known portmanteaus or rhymes, and check if the tool successfully finds them, and with what precision and recall.

Just having people plug in words and find things that they find interesting is going to result in people feeling it's better than it actually is. I tried a few examples, and while some of the outputs seemed "OK", they missed what seemed like obvious puns that I know exist in the lexicon because I was able to massage the inputs until it found them.

I think the first step would be to use a tool for word selection that does a better job finding actual synonyms instead of "words that are vaguely the same".

The phoneme matching aspect of it obviously works very well. I think if you had more control over the words it would use, you'd get better results. See my comment about "politician" above. I've repeated tried combinations with the word politician in them, and none of the synonyms I would expect to show up ever showed up.

This is a really cool implementation, and I'm impressed with the examples given.

So, I did what every obnoxious person would do and put in "stupid" and "politician", but I didn't get any real good results, mostly because it didn't use any of the synonyms for "politician" that I would expect... like president, senator, congressman, governor, prime minister (would it even deal with compound words?) or even the most obvious: politician!

Instead it used these words: moralist, orator, critic, rabbi, teacher, entrepreneur, philanthropist, leader (OK, that one is good), economist, attorney, prelate, administrator, constituent, assemblyman, and assemblywoman. Everyone of these was either not really a kind of politician, or a pretty obscure word.

Now some of these portmanteaus were pretty clever through the matching of phoneme clusters, and not just exact ones, but similar ones, and that's what's really cool about this tool, but ultimately I couldn't get what I was looking for!

At the very least it should use the words you entered!

Nevertheless, I definitely want to play with this more.

So, to the authors I'd say they've built something really cool and I'm looking forward to seeing how it can be improved.

I put in "software engineer" and got 'technologyologist'... which feels right!

continuous integration = continunity (continue/unity)

artificial intelligence = smartificial (smart/artificial)

garbage collector = debriscycler (debris/recycler)

Ah, it's an adjecdevice! Or a pejoradevice, depending on how rude it's being.

I'd love to see a version for non-US English. Seeing "AA" for sounds like the 'o' in 'pot' is..very strange. And it gives rhymes like

shock bach SH.AA.K B.AA.K

which I guess only rhyme in the USA.

bad seed: horrendousperm (horrendous + endosperm). Possibly produced by a fertilizer miser.

Also discussed on SSC: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/24/ot122-openne-thread/#c...

Where do you think I found it? ;)

Evil Corporation > sindustry (sin+industry)

Small Business > slenderprise (slender/enterprise), businessmany (businessman + many), revenuemerous (revenue/numerous)

Boring Movie > screenplazy (screenplay/lazy)

Stupid Idea > retardicle (retard/article)

These are so good!

"Hacker" "News" - gossipculture - newsworthief - subculjournal

https://www.punchlinedesign.net/pun_generator/Venture+capita...

rhymes with... misallocation exploration.

I was hoping to see motel from motor and hotel, brunch from breakfast and lunch.

Tongue in cheek: misleader (mislead/leader) and the rhyme “disrespect reelect”

https://www.punchlinedesign.net/pun_generator/lazy+fox

Stop being such a grumbeaver (grumpy/beaver)!

Genious!

poop + politician = craparatchik. the math checks out.

Idiot + Friend = Dumbigo (dumb/amigo)

I'll be using that!

Software + Engineer -> electrontrepreneur. So true, nowadays.

I found this one too, and registered the .com - lol!

This is terrible fun, or dare i say "shitty-witty"

Your generator keeps suggesting me to use the n-word (hard r) and I am not putting anything racist in. Can you please add some filters?

I would even go so far as to say he should just take that word out of his dictionary. There's never a time that it should serve it as a suggestion, IMO.

crypto + currency = greenbackdoor

warfareogance (warfare arrogance) needs to become a thing

We used to just call them NeoCons.

labyrinth + monster = navigator (navigate/gator)

nightmairline

This is where rappers hang out.

President Trump:

contradictator (contradict/dictator)

haha I love that I am being downvoted for the output of this service/bot

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