Install Theme

Jamie Brew’s “predictive text” stuff (the cookbook one, the Strunk and White one I just reblogged) is way funnier and more grammatical than usual Markov chain output, which is what computer-generated text on the internet usually is.  It looks like it has learned vocabulary and grammatical structures from the source text and is generating new text using them, with awareness of things like maintaining an overall topic across multiple sentences.

This definitely isn’t impossible, but given that I can’t seem to find his code anywhere (or even information about what algorithms he’s using), and that “predictive text” is an odd and inaccurate way of describing this kind of program, I am skeptical that he’s actually producing these with a computer.

ETA: someone asks about the code and he says it will be available in a couple of weeks once he learns how to use github, and that he’s “newish to coding.”  This sounds pretty iffy.  (New to coding, hasn’t used github, but can do advanced NLP?)

  1. andsemicolon reblogged this from nostalgebraist and added:
    Reblogging for more context.
  2. neurocybernetics-moved-blog reblogged this from nostalgebraist and added:
    tbh i think it could be Markov chain output, just carefully picked and heavily editedbut the fact that he’s describing...
  3. pbkdf2 reblogged this from pbkdf2 and added:
    wait, nevermind? idk, weird
  4. ambiguations reblogged this from dharma-initiative-official and added:
    The full text of The Elements of Style is on the Gutenberg Project (can’t easily link as I’m on my phone). Every...
  5. jiskblr reblogged this from nostalgebraist and added:
    https://twitter.com/robdubbin/status/693983628662022146 This guy may have done the complex coding and for some reason...
  6. magfrump reblogged this from nostalgebraist and added:
    This actually sounds totally reasonable relative to my experience with linguistics grad students. Ugly code with no...
  7. itsbenedict reblogged this from nostalgebraist
  8. dharma-initiative-official reblogged this from nostalgebraist and added:
    i’m unsure - this randomly-chosen example e.g. seems pretty precisely the kind of thing you might be able to get out of...
  9. exsecant-blog reblogged this from nostalgebraist and added:
    Maybe he’s restricting word usage to keep it topical (i.e. making it more likely to use a word once it’s used the word...