Resources for Generative Text

Some Resources:

Rita.js

RiTa is an open-source software toolkit for computational literature.

"Designed to support the creation of new works of computational literature, the RiTa library provides tools for artists and writers working with natural language in programmable media. The library is designed to be simple while still enabling a range of powerful features, from grammar and Markov-based generation to text-mining, to feature-analysis (part-of-speech, phonemes, stresses, etc). RiTa is implemented in both Java and JavaScript, is free/libre and open-source, and runs in a number of popular programming environments including Android, Processing, Node, and p5.js."

Here are some helpful RiTa demos by our TA, Char Stiles:

Here are some helpful Coding Train videos:

ML5.js

"ml5.js aims to make machine learning approachable for a broad audience of artists, creative coders, and students. The library provides access to machine learning algorithms and models in the browser, building on top of TensorFlow.js with no other external dependencies. The library is supported by code examples, tutorials, and sample datasets with an emphasis on ethical computing. "

  • Word2Vec
  • LSTM (Note: training a new LSTM model requires Python)

Here is a helpful Coding Train video:

Wordnik API

The Wordnik API "lets you request definitions, example sentences, spelling suggestions, related words like synonyms and antonyms, phrases containing a given word, word autocompletion, random words, words of the day, and much more."

Here's a helpful demo by our TA, Char Stiles: 

Here's a helpful Coding Train video: 

Text Corpora

Kazemi writes: "This project is a collection of static corpora (plural of "corpus") that are potentially useful in the creation of weird internet stuff. I would like this to help with rapid prototyping of projects. I'm also hoping that this can be used as a teaching tool. My hope is that students can be pointed to this project and they can pick and choose different interesting data sources to meld together for the creation of prototypes."

Example corpora include (among others):

If you would like industrial-strength corpora (e.g millions of words of transcribed soap operas, etc.), see here.

Project Gutenberg (via Allison Parrish)

N-Grams

An n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sample of text or speech. You can view the history of select n-grams using this nice Google viewer.

Professor Mark Davies at Brigham Young University makes N-Gram datasets available for free download (--note: with a simple registration). These words are also tagged with their Parts-of-Speech, using the PoS codes found here.

  • Set One (complete): the 1,000,000 most frequent 2, 3, 4, and 5-grams, from the 430-million word COCA dataset
  • Set Two (demo): the most frequent 2, 3, 4, and 5-word strings from the 14 billion word iWeb corpus

Here's a helpful Coding Train video: