Chomskybot
Encyclopedia
The Chomskybot is a program that generates paragraphs which appear similar to those in the corpus of Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...

's linguistic
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 works, but are humorously devoid of any meaning, by combining at random phrases taken from Chomsky's actual works. The Chomskybot is derived from another program called Foggy, which originally generated "fake" manageresei.e., the language of business management
Management
Management in all business and organizational activities is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively...

. The phrases from Chomsky were originally collected by John F. Sowa
John F. Sowa
John Florian Sowa is the computer scientist who invented conceptual graphs, a graphic notation for logic and natural language, based on the structures in semantic networks and on the existential graphs of Charles S. Peirce. He is currently developing high-level "ontologies" for artificial...

, the program was redesigned by Anthony Aristar
Anthony Aristar
Anthony Manuel Rodrigues Aristar is a linguist, the founder of the LINGUIST List, the most important linguistic resource on the web, and currently a professor of linguistics at Eastern Michigan University.-Studies:...

 and John Lawler
John Lawler
John Lawler is a retired University of Michigan general linguist who is perhaps best known to the wider public for his role in creating the Chomskybot...

, and the Perl version was written by Kevin McGowan.

An example of the Chomskybot's output:
For any transformation which is sufficiently diversified in application to be of any interest, most of the methodological work in modern linguistics is not to be considered in determining a corpus of utterance tokens upon which conformity has been defined by the paired utterance test. By combining adjunctions and certain deformations, the theory of syntactic features developed earlier may remedy and, at the same time, eliminate the system of base rules exclusive of the lexicon. Clearly, the fundamental error of regarding functional notions as categorial is unspecified with respect to an abstract underlying order. Furthermore, the notion of level of grammaticalness is to be regarded as the extended c-command discussed in connection with (34). Presumably, relational information appears to correlate rather closely with the levels of acceptability from fairly high (eg (99a)) to virtual gibberish (eg (98d)).

How it works

Chomskybot operates as follows: it always generates five sentence
Sentence (linguistics)
In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it...

s to a paragraph
Paragraph
A paragraph is a self-contained unit of a discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. A paragraph consists of one or more sentences. The start of a paragraph is indicated by beginning on a new line. Sometimes the first line is indented...

; each sentence contains a fixed number of parts for all such sentences; for each of the above mentioned parts there are a number of alternatives; it randomly chooses alternatives to construct sentences and paragraphs; furthermore, the author of the alternatives constructs them in such a way that every possible combination thereof is grammatically correct (although obviously semantically incoherent.)

See also

  • Chatterbot
    Chatterbot
    A chatter robot, chatterbot, chatbot, or chat bot is a computer program designed to simulate an intelligent conversation with one or more human users via auditory or textual methods, primarily for engaging in small talk. The primary aim of such simulation has been to fool the user into thinking...

  • SCIgen
    SCIgen
    SCIgen is a program created by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that randomly generates nonsense in the form of computer science research papers, including graphs, diagrams, and citations...

    , a computer program that randomly generates computer science research papers
  • Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
    Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
    "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct but semantically nonsensical. The term was originally used in his 1955 thesis "Logical Structures of Linguistic Theory"...


External links

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