
The History of Text Generation - polm23
http://mathesonmarcault.com/index.php/2015/12/15/randomly-generated-title-goes-here/
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aantix
Are there any natural text generation libraries that can generate commentary
on time series data?

E.g. blood glucose levels remained steady for the first two months then rose
sharply in the past week.

~~~
gattilorenz
Well, yes and no.

Yes in the sense that there are libraries that can generate text (e.g.
SimpleNLG), but you need to write code that does the analysis and chooses the
content to show.

The "modern" way would be to train a seq2seq model. But for that you need
training data, and it's harder to control the correctness of the results.

For a start, you can look at the slides from this summer school
[https://nlgsummer.github.io](https://nlgsummer.github.io) and read up on the
BabyTalk project ([http://www.nlg-wiki.org/systems/BabyTalk](http://www.nlg-
wiki.org/systems/BabyTalk)). SimpleNLG is indeed simple to use, but maybe for
your task a template-based system (e.g.
[https://github.com/TallChris91/PASS](https://github.com/TallChris91/PASS)) is
enough.

TLDR: you either need to write code for managing the time series, or need a
large enough dataset to train on. Or rely on commercial services such as those
offered by Arria

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enriquto
Warning: if you want to read this text without javascript you have to disable
css, otherwise all the content is hidden. So, it has come to that. This is the
new web.

~~~
dfrage
Thanks for the tip! I use uMatrix with aggressive defaults including no
Javascript, somehow this trick didn't occur to me.

Although my general rule is that if Javascript is required to read a site's
content, it's probably not worth it. With the storied NoScript being released
for Chrome
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19650731](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19650731)),
I suspect I'll have more and more company as the new web gets more abusive and
dangerous.

~~~
enriquto
I am so in awe at this site! It is the first actual example I have witnessed
of non-monotonic progressive enhancement. You start with a text-only browser
and the site is OK; so far so good. Then you keep adding features to the
browser and the site progressively disappears and re-appears again.

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gattilorenz
Wow, basically grammar-based generation has been a thing for quite a while
now.

I'll have to print one of these circles and bring it to my NLG group to
show...

