Re: What are the monks doing with Perl and Linguistics?

This is not really science... but your post brought up fond memories: One of the first things I did with Perl was to create statistics on letter, letter pairs, letter triplets etc. distribution in a given text, and then used this to create random texts that resembled the original text. The results were quite good, and rather funny, especially when using several source texts (e.g. mixing the KJV bible and Edgar Allan Poe).

After a few years, I learned that what I had implemented is a very common algorithm in a lot of different fields: Markov Chains :).

Comment on Re: What are the monks doing with Perl and Linguistics?

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Re: Re: What are the monks doing with Perl and Linguistics? by allolex (Curate) on May 05, 2003 at 10:29 UTC
LOL. I can imagine the results. Actually, you really don't have to mix texts if the original (even one author) is sufficiently cryptic. Noam Chomsky has been able to maximize ambiguity in his work and the Chomskybot (written in Perl as well) is even more fun than Chomsky himself. If they don't understand what you're saying, you must be a genius. ;-) Let's hear it for Markov chains! -- Allolex	[reply]
Re: Re: What are the monks doing with Perl and Linguistics? by thraxil (Prior) on May 05, 2003 at 15:26 UTC
After a few years, I learned that what I had implemented is a very common algorithm in a lot of different fields: Markov Chains :). yay, markov chains! i use markov chains to generate random posts for my weblog. it uses the database of all other posts to build the transition matrix. anders pearson	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: What are the monks doing with Perl and Linguistics? by allolex (Curate) on May 05, 2003 at 16:16 UTC
I can see you're into the spirit of the thing. here is a site for the true Markov-chain connoisseur. (It's really just one of many programs by the same guy.) -- Allolex	[reply]