Subject: Re: [lojban] ChomskyBot

From: Richard Curnow <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 2 Apr 2002 22:55:27 +0100

On Fri, Mar 15, 2002 at 03:56:50PM -0700, Jay Kominek wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 16 Mar 2002, Alex Gontmakher wrote:
> 
> > ChomskyBot, see
> > http://www.helsinki.fi/~jppesone/applets/ChomskyBot.html, is an
> > application that generates realistically-looking text from a given
> > vocabulary (of course, missing any sense altogether).
> >
> > It would be interesting to apply the concept to Lojban ;)
> 
> http://nuzban.wiw.org/wiki/?random%20sentence%20generator
> mentions the LLG random sentence generator, and my random sentence
> generator.
> 
> Richard Curnow also has a system under development.
>
> (Mine use an algorith from a fellow out of .nz which analyzes the grammar
> to determine all the proper weightings so you get sentences of exactly the
> length you want. Nora's (the LLG one) just has hard coded weights. Not
> sure what Richard's does, though I think he told me at one point.)

Sorry for the late reply - I'm gradually reading through a huge backlog
of Lojban list messages. Only a few hundred to go now!

My 'algorithm' just has a lot of hardcoded weights and a few that are
defined by variables that can be set at the top of the program. It's
coded in perl. You can find it in the rtg/rtg.pl file in jbofihe's CVS
module on digitalkingdom.org. To prevent endless recursion, a count is
kept of how many times a rule has been picked that can 'go back up' the
syntax tree. Once the counter hits a limit, only non-recursive rules
are picked afterwards. It's all fairly Heath-Robinson. I only really
wanted it for soak-testing the fix I did to jbofihe to cure some
problems with the tense parsing that were found last autumn. Apologies
for never releasing these fixes in a new version - I drifted onto some
big updates to another project (chrony) around Xmas and haven't got back
onto jbofihe since!

-- 
Richard.
------------------+---------------------------------
Richard P. Curnow | Free software author + proponent
Weston-super-Mare | a'o kansa ke skami se fanva
United Kingdom | http://www.rrbcurnow.freeuk.com/