4 ms·

Markov chain paper title generator

36 points by vedant 15y ago

willvarfar 15y ago
Lovely :) Reminds me of my own playing with markov chains; http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13292744100/the-spam-posts-on-a-forum-i-keep-an-eye-on-are http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13292744100/the-s...
alpb 15y ago
It would be much funnier with a demo page.
walrus 15y ago
When I ran it on my advisor's name, it gave the actual titles of two of his papers. Entertaining, though. It seems to be a common pattern. When I ran it with the argument "A Einstein", I got "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies." as one of the results. Edit: Also, for "P Erdos", I got "On a new law of large numbers."
- a_m0d 15y ago
  From the article: If you’re using a small corpus and long Markov chains, you’ll end up with lots of actual strings from the corpus, and no fake ones. If this happens, experiment with the second parameter to the constructor for the class “MarkovGenerator.” For the authors you are using, the corpus is too small.
  - vedant 15y ago
    Since Paul Erdos is one of the most prolific mathematicians ever, the problem is more likely that the default chain length (4) is too long for even a relatively large corpus. A chain length of 2 does much better.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- minikomi 15y ago
  Maybe you could keep actual paper names in a separate array, and check generated results against them before returning..
mid 15y ago
Ruby gem (without scraper): https://github.com/michaeldv/gabbler https://github.com/michaeldv/gabbler
fferen 15y ago
Also see http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/, an automatic CS paper generator. One of their papers was accepted to a conference, and they gave some hilarious speeches (also in link).
emu 15y ago
I'd also recommend a good game of arXiv vs. snarXiv: http://snarxiv.org/vs-arxiv/ http://snarxiv.org/vs-arxiv/ As a non high-energy physicist, it's surprisingly hard! I usually do _worse_ than random chance, sometimes substantially so. The author also has perhaps my favorite definition of a CFG: "The snarXiv is based on a context free grammar (CFG) — basically a set of rules for computer-generated mad libs."
leviathan 15y ago
shameless plug: I wrote a "Lorem ipsum" replacement based on Markov chains and some public domain books as the corpus, http://wordum.net http://wordum.net

36 points by vedant 15y ago

Lovely :) Reminds me of my own playing with markov chains; http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13292744100/the-spam-posts-on-a-forum-i-keep-an-eye-on-are http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/13292744100/the-s...

alpb 15y ago

It would be much funnier with a demo page.

walrus 15y ago

When I ran it on my advisor's name, it gave the actual titles of two of his papers. Entertaining, though. It seems to be a common pattern. When I ran it with the argument "A Einstein", I got "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies." as one of the results. Edit: Also, for "P Erdos", I got "On a new law of large numbers."

a_m0d 15y ago
From the article: If you’re using a small corpus and long Markov chains, you’ll end up with lots of actual strings from the corpus, and no fake ones. If this happens, experiment with the second parameter to the constructor for the class “MarkovGenerator.” For the authors you are using, the corpus is too small.
- vedant 15y ago
  Since Paul Erdos is one of the most prolific mathematicians ever, the problem is more likely that the default chain length (4) is too long for even a relatively large corpus. A chain length of 2 does much better.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
minikomi 15y ago
Maybe you could keep actual paper names in a separate array, and check generated results against them before returning..

mid 15y ago

Ruby gem (without scraper): https://github.com/michaeldv/gabbler https://github.com/michaeldv/gabbler

fferen 15y ago

Also see http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/, an automatic CS paper generator. One of their papers was accepted to a conference, and they gave some hilarious speeches (also in link).

emu 15y ago

I'd also recommend a good game of arXiv vs. snarXiv: http://snarxiv.org/vs-arxiv/ http://snarxiv.org/vs-arxiv/ As a non high-energy physicist, it's surprisingly hard! I usually do _worse_ than random chance, sometimes substantially so. The author also has perhaps my favorite definition of a CFG: "The snarXiv is based on a context free grammar (CFG) — basically a set of rules for computer-generated mad libs."

leviathan 15y ago

shameless plug: I wrote a "Lorem ipsum" replacement based on Markov chains and some public domain books as the corpus, http://wordum.net http://wordum.net