Sunday, November 05, 2006

"Here, lemme take a Pikachu..."

So say that you want to pepper your speech with non-sequitur references to some particular topic -- like whenever you use a string of words that rhymes with the name of a Pokémon name, replace that string with the name of said Pokémon.

That wouldn't be that hard -- there's a pretty happenin' metric for finding rhymes, ready to go.

So you'd just have to have a list of the words for the domain you want to substitute in, make sure that you have phonetic descriptions of each of them (Bradley Buda's rhyme metric uses the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary's format)... then run through your input text searching for substrings that rhyme with words in your list with a score over some particular threshold. And hilarity ensues.

A similar technique could be used for generating phrases like "my feet are staying!" for "auf wiedersehen!" -- you could something hill-climbing-like (with a parser in the loop, so as to try to maintain grammaticality) to substitute out common phrases...

The only problem is -- what rhymes with "Psyduck"?

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