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Portmanteau Generator

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Re: Portmanteau Generator

#51

Post by ggggtez »

A think the right way to test such a tool is to start with a list of known portmanteaus or rhymes, and check if the tool successfully finds them, and with what precision and recall.

Just having people plug in words and find things that they find interesting is going to result in people feeling it's better than it actually is. I tried a few examples, and while some of the outputs seemed "OK", they missed what seemed like obvious puns that I know exist in the lexicon because I was able to massage the inputs until it found them.

Re: Portmanteau Generator

#52

Post by gwern »

ggggtez wrote: post #43
gwern wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, the paper says it's just using the FastText word embedding: https://nips2018creativity.github.io/doc/entendrepreneur.pdf which is just a particularly well-done word2vec: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.09405.pdf 'Lasker' and 'chess' no doubt co-occur quite strongly in their Internet corpus.

On the other hand, it comes up with "Beagle" and "Labrador" as synonyms of "cat". Color me unimpressed. This seems like something that has been done before, and the fact the paper has no references indicates to me that the author maybe didn't do background research. While [0] is different, I could have sworn I've seen a paper which discussed creating puns in this fashion. [0] http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W05-1614

> On the other hand, it comes up with "Beagle" and "Labrador" as synonyms of "cat". Color me unimpressed.

'It doesn't matter whether a cat has floppy ears or yellow fur so long as it catches mice.'

Re: Portmanteau Generator

#58

Post by yesenadam »

binarymax wrote: post #26

The results are just incredible. The depth of the project is very deep. Case in point, chess+clock yields hourglasker (hourglass & Lasker). Lasker was a German chess champion, well known in chess circles but the average person would have no idea who he is. I wonder if this is using wikipedia or dbpedia to walk a graph and find words to stick together. That's the only way I could think of doing this.

>Lasker was a German chess champion

That doesn't quite do him justice - Emanuel Lasker was world champion for 27 (!) years, 1894-1921, a record not likely ever to be surpassed. And a mathematician (e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laskerian_ring ) and fine writer. In fact I learnt to play from Lasker's Manual of Chess. It's very poetic in places, e.g.

On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in the checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite.

edit: I guess you knew that if you were trying chess + clock hehe.

Re: Portmanteau Generator

#59

Post by yesenadam »

I'd love to see a version for non-US English. Seeing "AA" for sounds like the 'o' in 'pot' is..very strange. And it gives rhymes like

shock bach SH.AA.K B.AA.K

which I guess only rhyme in the USA.

Re: Portmanteau Generator

#60

Post by rayalez »

Evil Corporation > sindustry (sin+industry)

Small Business > slenderprise (slender/enterprise), businessmany (businessman + many), revenuemerous (revenue/numerous)

Boring Movie > screenplazy (screenplay/lazy)

Stupid Idea > retardicle (retard/article)

These are so good!

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