Nantucket: an accidental limerick detector | Hacker News Reader

Nantucket: an accidental limerick detector

daniellesucher.com

59 pointsOmni5cience14 comments

I created haiku_robot (http://www.reddit.com/user/haiku_robot) on reddit and, from experience, found that it wasn't too worthwhile optimizing for accuracy. The cases where I got the syllable count wrong seemed to have an equal distribution of upvotes compared to the ones where I got it right and regional variations in pronunciation meant that I was accused of being wrong more often when I was right than when I was wrong.

Haiku_robot would be much better if it broke lines and only at phrase or clause boundaries, not just anywhere.

Disagree! Enjambment suits the form. I tend to like the robot's output.

Another thing I considered but again, some of the most highly upvoted posts have been at awkward phrase boundaries.

This is pretty neat. I've been puttering on one on and off, but it's horribly broken so I haven't released it, so this one gets extra points for actually existing. :)

In case my half-done thoughts are useful to anyone looking to build something in this space:

My aim is/was to allow configurable matching, so you can match, e.g. "XxxXxx / XxxXxx1 / XxxXxx / XxxXxx1", meaning four consecutive lines of six syllables, where X is a stressed, and x an unstressed syllable, and where the last syllable of the 2nd and 4th lines have the same phoneme, denoted "1", whereas there are no phonemic constraints on any other syllables (this allows a crude approach to rhyme).

I'm not entirely happy with cmudict because, since it works one syllable at a time, it can't really do much about stress, which can vary depending on the surrounding words. I've been using the output of espeak -x instead, which gives a phonetic rendering of an entire sentence, including assigning both phonemes and stress. I'm not sure if it's genuinely an improvement though. Its poorly documented output surely isn't an improvement! And in particular it gives a normal prosaic reading of a sentence, which might be too constraining for poetry-finding, since poems often allow a bit of freedom on moving around the stresses.

The idea to scan large amounts of text is to compile the configurable pattern into a regex that matches espeak -x output, so for example X gets mapped to a "match any stressed syllable" regex snippet. Alas, that's error-prone, especially since the espeak -x phoneme format is a bit quirky (e.g. no fixed length per syllable or syllable markers, so you need to have some per-language rules to figure out what sequences of ASCII constitute what, which I haven't debugged).

That's actually why Nantucket ignores meter for now - cmudict's stress patterns are really inaccurate and unsatisfying. espeak is an interesting idea!

One thought I want to explore in a later version is using cmudict's stress patterns for polysyllabic words, but ignoring any stress/meter rules for monosyllabic words. I suspect that'll do pretty well, and it'll be interesting to test it out.

That sounds like a good heuristic. Monosyllabic words don't seem entirely free when it comes to assigning accent, but more free overall. Polysyllabic words seem relatively stable, except for some oddities where you can take poetic license, like putting the accent on the last syllable of "cursed" ("cursèd").

For an example of where it seems weird w/ monosyllabic words, compare, "I WENT to the STORE to BUY some BREAD", which has a sort of poetic rhythm, with "I went TO the STORE to BUY some BREAD" which seems weird, even in a poem. An offhand analysis is that stressing the main verb and then running "to the" together into one unstressed syllable is more natural than making the main verb unstressed and stressing the preposition. Perhaps buried in the code of some text-to-speech engine are heuristics that cover some of these cases? But perhaps they can just be ignored at first, and patched up later in cases where results are too strange.

Anyway, this is just miscellaneous thoughts about future enhancements; the current Nantucket is cool to try out.

Sure, sure. (And thanks. ^^) But it's fun brainstorming heuristics!

http://wry.me/sonnetron/ computes meter using cmudict. It worked fine there, I think, though the word salad it's running over is easier -- when phrases make actual sense you sometimes get a verb mispronounced as a noun, and so on.

The logic is simple: reject a word if it has both stressed and unstressed syllables, with a stressed one falling on an unstressed beat in the meter. Pass anything else.

Very neat project, BTW. I've been wanting a good solution to the unknown-word problem. Here's a post on my blank-verse detector before: http://darius.livejournal.com/48525.html

Fantastic! This shows the possibilities of what can be created given the text on Gutenberg archives. Assuming all the fiction ever created is available on your laptop (quite feasible now, except of course, for the small matter copyright) what new expressions can be derived?

On a different note, I read the about section of the blog and saw that the OP, in addition to this great stuff, is a beekeeping, hacking attorney who also spins fire. Amazing!

for placing every moment of

the labourer's time and that of

his family at the

disposal of the

capitalist for the purpose of

greater quantity of labour

In addition to a measure

of its extension

ie duration

labour now acquires a measure

-Karl Marx

It may be interesting to adapt the TeX hyphenation methods to this problem.

Great stuff! Seeing the thought processes intertwined with the implementation is fascinating.

I am (the man) from Nantucket. Any other Nantucketers on HN?

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