I've been automatically doing the same thing with reddit comments for the last year: http://www.reddit.com/user/haiku_robot
If you sort by upvotes, there's a number of gems in there.
Times Haikus
21–30 of 39 posts
Re: Times Haikus
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't it just automatically extracting sentences that can be broken into 5, 7, 5 groups of syllables? I don't think anyone has made any attempt to summarise the article. Very interesting though.
The process is described in the about section ( http://haiku.nytimes.com/about ). There is an algorithm that extracts the haikus but they only make it to the website when a journalist thinks it good: "The algorithm discards some potential poems if they are awkwardly constructed and it does not scan articles covering sensitive topics. Furthermore, the machine has no aesthetic sense. It can't distinguish between an ele…
Ah, very good! The other interesting point is they use a dictionary that includes number of syllable information that have augmented with words like "Rihanna".
Part of me wishes this page had been submitted instead of the top level.
Re: Times Haikus
#23I'm not an expert on haikus, but I'm guessing that in English, there's an accepted convention that each line in a haiku generally serves as an independent clause?
So:
What she has given
them is institutional
hagiography
The story's not clear;
Durer may have cooked it up
just to do a nude
Re: Times Haikus
#24Awesome! Similar in spirit to (though far cooler than) a simple project I threw together to learn/play with Ruby:
http://haikubot.herokuapp.com/
Not sure my single Heroku dyno with stand up to any kind of HN-hammering, so click with caution :)
Re: Times Haikus
#25I'm not an expert on haikus, but I'm guessing that in English, there's an accepted convention that each line in a haiku generally serves as an independent clause? So: What she has given them is institutional hagiography is less "aesthetic" than: The story's not clear; Durer may have cooked it up just to do a nude One extra layer of machine work could be to use NLP to filter out phrases in which the fifth/seventh syll…
Eh, I think the only somewhat-hard requirement is seventeen syllables, and even that is often waved in favor of aesthetics. Plus they really tend to work better in Japanese anyway.
Somewhat on-topic: Jack Kerouac made attempts to "Americanize" the haiku form a bit, which I always thought were pretty neat. I think they're collected in a book called (something like) Book of Haiku.
I still like your idea though :)
Re: Times Haikus
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
The process is described in the about section ( http://haiku.nytimes.com/about ). There is an algorithm that extracts the haikus but they only make it to the website when a journalist thinks it good: "The algorithm discards some potential poems if they are awkwardly constructed and it does not scan articles covering sensitive topics. Furthermore, the machine has no aesthetic sense. It can't distinguish between an ele…
Ah, very good! The other interesting point is they use a dictionary that includes number of syllable information that have augmented with words like "Rihanna". Part of me wishes this page had been submitted instead of the top level.
Yes, to clarify, I started with the base CMUdict for syllable counts, but I had the program keep track of any term misses it ran into. This way I could augment its vocabulary. It also helped me find some tokenization bugs and also try some rules for dealing with compound words like "unsportsmanlike"
Re: Times Haikus
#27I'm not an expert on haikus, but I'm guessing that in English, there's an accepted convention that each line in a haiku generally serves as an independent clause? So: What she has given them is institutional hagiography is less "aesthetic" than: The story's not clear; Durer may have cooked it up just to do a nude One extra layer of machine work could be to use NLP to filter out phrases in which the fifth/seventh syll…
Eh, I think the only somewhat-hard requirement is seventeen syllables, and even that is often waved in favor of aesthetics. Plus they really tend to work better in Japanese anyway. Somewhat on-topic: Jack Kerouac made attempts to "Americanize" the haiku form a bit, which I always thought were pretty neat. I think they're collected in a book called (something like) Book of Haiku . I still like your idea though :)
According to the American Haiku Society (yes, it exists), the syllable count is actually less important than including a seasonal word and a "cut" between two different sets of imagery. But that's a little harder to teach a bit of hack code to do... so...
Re: Times Haikus
#28Awesome! Similar in spirit to (though far cooler than) a simple project I threw together to learn/play with Ruby: http://haikubot.herokuapp.com/ Not sure my single Heroku dyno with stand up to any kind of HN-hammering, so click with caution :) (Or see https://github.com/keithfancher/HaikuBot )
I LOVE the HAIKUBOT. Great work
Re: Times Haikus
#29This is hilarious. With a bit of tweaking it could be made to only detect "haikus" whose lines end at suitable grammatical boundaries rather than word boundaries. I think this would give rise to a higher quality selection.
There are a few awkwardness checks we do that disqualify some haikus. For instance, if the second or third line has a comma right near the front or back, or if there are month or title abbreviations, etc. But I'm always looking to refine it further.
Re: Times Haikus
#30I wonder if he used any code from a story [1] posted last week. http://mobile.theverge.com/culture/2013/3/18/4118916/finding...
Sorry, I actually wrote the haiku finding logic in November and it's been running since then while we figured out the look of the tumblr and the moderation workflow.