I've been working on a project involving linguistics and programming for school, attempting to write functions (or perhaps subroutines now) capable of returning poetic devices, but I've been implementing the project in PHP. There is very little that the user must input to the program, so the GUI of the browser is not at all important.

What's most important is the efficiency of database queries. The program uses IPhOD, a phonotactic database that gives information about syllables and sound, which I use to return lists of rhymes, and I plan to use WordNet and VerbNet extensively. I've already edited a table of word morphology exceptions in WordNet, adding the type of inflection to the database, so that my morphology function functions. I've also read a lot about OpenCyc, but I've had no success with using it. In my imagination OpenCyc could be used to return fundamental information about WordNet synsets that the program could take to build intelligent metaphors, and from what I've read it's possible.

If anyone has experience in linguistics, it's likely that they've heard of systemic grammar. My plan at first was to generate poems on which an adaptation of the Turing test could be run, but now I'm very worried that the project is too big (hints the new goal: functions as poetic devices). I wanted to incorporate systemic functional grammar into my program to generate phrase structure, the backbone of the lines.

The reason I'm giving this background information is that I'm seriously thinking about reimplementing the program in Perl. I'm very new to Perl, but the code is visually very similar to PHP, and so the switch would be easy. What benefits might I gain from such a reimplementation? What modules might offer help? And if anyone has any experience in incorporating OpenCyc into Perl that would be more than wonderful, or rather if anyone has experience with programming any of this linguistics stuff, I'd really appreciate the info, because my adviser has no clue what I'm doing.

Thanks for any help you can give

-Justin

In reply to Poetry in the Machine by framboise

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