7 ms·

Pentametron Reveals Unintended Poetry of Twitter Users

50 points by thejteam 14y ago

unimpressive 14y ago
I'm reminded of the library of babel in Louis Borges fiction. If you generated every possible iambic meter poem and then sifted through them with some mechanism (like crowdsourcing), you could probably find some winners.
- nswanberg 14y ago
  That sounds like what happens with poets and collected culture now--a poet looking to create a poem searches their memory for experience, chooses a form, and after some revisions produces a work. That work is then shopped around, sometimes in formal ways like a publisher, or informal through friends, and through time civilization filters and canonized certain poems, forever adding to, updating, and removing works from the list. It seems possible, though certainly not easy, to mechanize some or all of that.
  - unimpressive 14y ago
    Exactly, poetry has enough structure that unlike regular English prose, it seem plausible that you could get meaningful output from a computer program. Then again, meaningful output isn't exactly necessary.[0] [0]: http://www.ubu.com/historical/racter/index.html http://www.ubu.com/historical/racter/index.html
- abecedarius 14y ago
  You want every possible sonnet? OK: http://wry.me/sonnetron http://wry.me/sonnetron (slight exaggeration, yes.)
- Wingman4l7 14y ago
  This reminds me of the Roald Dahl short story The Great Automatic Grammatizator, which, although dated, examines the possible consequences of automatically generating literature. I also think of the sci-fi short story Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson, which examines how perpetual copyright would negatively impact music (there are only so many novel melodies that are pleasant to listen to): http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm
davidvaughan 14y ago
This is very clever. love watching people do the Harlem shake I really really really want a snake How does it work? I'm guessing it 1) scans tweets for pentameters using a large corpus annotated by syllables, then 2) looks up a rhyming dictionary to check the tweet is likely to be fruitful (i.e. doesn't end with the word orange or similar) and 3) waits...
- klenwell 14y ago
  Here's some pythonesque pseudo-code that might do it: for tweet in twitter_api.latest_tweets(): phonetic_tweet = convert_tweet_to_phonemes(tweet) if is_iambic(phonetic_tweet): end_rhymes = extract_end_rhymes(phonetic_tweet) db.insert_iambic_tweet(tweet, end_rhymes) for end_rhyme in end_rhymes: rhyming_tweets = db.select_rhyming_tweets(end_rhyme) if rhyming_tweets: rhyming_tweet = random.choice(rhyming_tweets) return [tweet, rhyming_tweet] There are several open source word lists out there that make this feasible.
- abecedarius 14y ago
  I also wrote a filter over Twitter for iambic pentameter once, and had a friend write a web frontend to it. Here's my (messy) code; http://glozer.net/ http://glozer.net/ wrote the frontend in Erlang but AFAIK never released it. https://github.com/darius/versecop https://github.com/darius/versecop Pentametron is cooler. I did try filtering for rhymes too, but there wasn't enough data in the free feed, at least back then.
- nzukoski 14y ago
  I read somewhere that it uses the cmu pronouncing dictionary which would give it both the meter and rhyme it needs (http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict)
kandalf 14y ago
Reminds me of SlamWhale (2011) [1], but the added meter rules makes it even better. [1] http://www.slamwhale.com/ http://www.slamwhale.com/
gojomo 14y ago
Has anyone made a text editor optimized for poetic verse? It'd automatically highlight syllable counts (and alternate the coloring of syllable-letter-groups within words). It'd indicate with bolding, underline, or other annotation stressed syllables. (Simple heuristics would get a lot right, and authors could correct the mistakes.) It could help with rhymes and near-rhymes. (I know there are already a lot of tools for this.) Would make a nice web app.
- Wingman4l7 14y ago
  I don't know if this one does all those things, but it's been featured here: Show HN: An IDE for poets (http://tranquillpoet.com http://tranquillpoet.com) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4775886 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4775886
mnicole 14y ago
Someone posted Pantametron when http://www.140verses.com/discover http://www.140verses.com/discover was posted last week or so. Both are strangely delightful.

50 points by thejteam 14y ago

I'm reminded of the library of babel in Louis Borges fiction. If you generated every possible iambic meter poem and then sifted through them with some mechanism (like crowdsourcing), you could probably find some winners.

nswanberg 14y ago
That sounds like what happens with poets and collected culture now--a poet looking to create a poem searches their memory for experience, chooses a form, and after some revisions produces a work. That work is then shopped around, sometimes in formal ways like a publisher, or informal through friends, and through time civilization filters and canonized certain poems, forever adding to, updating, and removing works from the list. It seems possible, though certainly not easy, to mechanize some or all of that.
- unimpressive 14y ago
  Exactly, poetry has enough structure that unlike regular English prose, it seem plausible that you could get meaningful output from a computer program. Then again, meaningful output isn't exactly necessary.[0] [0]: http://www.ubu.com/historical/racter/index.html http://www.ubu.com/historical/racter/index.html
abecedarius 14y ago
You want every possible sonnet? OK: http://wry.me/sonnetron http://wry.me/sonnetron (slight exaggeration, yes.)
Wingman4l7 14y ago
This reminds me of the Roald Dahl short story The Great Automatic Grammatizator, which, although dated, examines the possible consequences of automatically generating literature. I also think of the sci-fi short story Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson, which examines how perpetual copyright would negatively impact music (there are only so many novel melodies that are pleasant to listen to): http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm

davidvaughan 14y ago

This is very clever. love watching people do the Harlem shake I really really really want a snake How does it work? I'm guessing it 1) scans tweets for pentameters using a large corpus annotated by syllables, then 2) looks up a rhyming dictionary to check the tweet is likely to be fruitful (i.e. doesn't end with the word orange or similar) and 3) waits...

klenwell 14y ago
Here's some pythonesque pseudo-code that might do it: for tweet in twitter_api.latest_tweets(): phonetic_tweet = convert_tweet_to_phonemes(tweet) if is_iambic(phonetic_tweet): end_rhymes = extract_end_rhymes(phonetic_tweet) db.insert_iambic_tweet(tweet, end_rhymes) for end_rhyme in end_rhymes: rhyming_tweets = db.select_rhyming_tweets(end_rhyme) if rhyming_tweets: rhyming_tweet = random.choice(rhyming_tweets) return [tweet, rhyming_tweet] There are several open source word lists out there that make this feasible.
abecedarius 14y ago
I also wrote a filter over Twitter for iambic pentameter once, and had a friend write a web frontend to it. Here's my (messy) code; http://glozer.net/ http://glozer.net/ wrote the frontend in Erlang but AFAIK never released it. https://github.com/darius/versecop https://github.com/darius/versecop Pentametron is cooler. I did try filtering for rhymes too, but there wasn't enough data in the free feed, at least back then.
nzukoski 14y ago
I read somewhere that it uses the cmu pronouncing dictionary which would give it both the meter and rhyme it needs (http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict)

kandalf 14y ago

Reminds me of SlamWhale (2011) [1], but the added meter rules makes it even better. [1] http://www.slamwhale.com/ http://www.slamwhale.com/

gojomo 14y ago

Has anyone made a text editor optimized for poetic verse? It'd automatically highlight syllable counts (and alternate the coloring of syllable-letter-groups within words). It'd indicate with bolding, underline, or other annotation stressed syllables. (Simple heuristics would get a lot right, and authors could correct the mistakes.) It could help with rhymes and near-rhymes. (I know there are already a lot of tools for this.) Would make a nice web app.

Wingman4l7 14y ago
I don't know if this one does all those things, but it's been featured here: Show HN: An IDE for poets (http://tranquillpoet.com http://tranquillpoet.com) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4775886 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4775886

mnicole 14y ago

Someone posted Pantametron when http://www.140verses.com/discover http://www.140verses.com/discover was posted last week or so. Both are strangely delightful.