ISTA 301 Blog: Briannatomaton

Part of one of my Computer Science 227 assignments was to implement a probabilistic text generator. That is, a program that scans through a large text file, finds patterns in which letters tend to follow which other letters most often, and then generates a new text semi-randomly based on those probabilities. It's loads of fun, as it tends to produce mad-libs style nonsense but in a prose style similar to that of the text that fed it.

Oddly enough, as an ISTA student, I'd already been exposed to this idea in Paul Cohen's class a few semesters ago, and shortly before the 227 assignment was posted, I joked with Brianna about setting up a text generator based on her writing. When it turned out that the final project in one of my classes was to implement this very idea, I was ecstatic.

What it does is read every substring of n length in a large text and then builds a hash table containing list of every character that follows that substring, weighted according to the frequency of its occurrence. I use Google Voice for my text messages, so I was able to download an HTML archive of all the text messages Brianna has sent me in the last 6 months. 15 minutes and a little studying up on regular expressions later, and I had removed all of my own responses as well as all the HTML tags and just and a solid plaintext block of Brianna's texts. I fed this, along with some of her blog and a few papers she wrote as an undergrad into a gigantic text file which totalled about 82,000 words.

Briannatomaton was born. I modified the code slightly so that I could force it to "seed" each randomly generated blurb with a word or two at the beginning, which let me have it "talk to" specific names that occur in the text I fed into it. Why would I want to do that? Simple. Because Briannatomaton got her own facebook page.