
Random Generation of English Sentences (1961) [pdf] - polm23
http://mt-archive.info/NPL-1961-Yngve.pdf
======
flyGuyOnTheSly
Can you imagine waking up one day in the near future and realizing that 96% of
the tweets you have been reading for the past year have been generated by a
computer?

The sheer thought of that just blew my mind a little.

It could drive the whole world mad.

~~~
Animats
Twitter is probably up to 30% already.

~~~
charlex815
Although, at this point it's mostly just spam, porn, and political bots at
really really low quality. Imagine the day when worthwhile content with
journalistic, artistic, or intellectual value is posted by machines. There are
already some great bots pumping out tweets with color palette, non-sensical
invention patent ideas, and historical events.

~~~
visarga
They can increase 1000x the output of text, I can read only about as much as
before.

~~~
stult
Just wait until you have a tweet-reading bot that picks out the items most
interesting to you. Arguably, we already have that in the form of Facebook's
like-driven echo chamber algorithms. But it would be nice to have a version
whose parameters are under your control rather than some large organization
with questionable motives.

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polm23
Some details you might miss just reading the paper:

Victor Yngve, the author, became the first president what would become the ACL
not long after publishing this.

This paper is showing off the language COMIT he developed. While it may not
look like much, it directly led to the development of SNOBOL and other string
processing languages.

This paper was a warm up to working on machine translation; turns out that
progress in the field was slow and led to what might be called the first AI
Winter, back in 1966!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALPAC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALPAC)

It seems that he moved away from Computational Linguistics to more theoretical
work after that, but he was publishing books even after 2000. He passed away
in 2012, and you can read his obituary from the ACL here:
[http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/J12-3001](http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/J12-3001)

------
visarga
This is the state of the art text generation result from Google:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02410](https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02410)

* < S > With even more new technologies coming onto the market quickly during the past three years , an increasing number of companies now must tackle the ever-changing and ever-changing environmental challenges online . < S > Check back for updates on this breaking news story . < S > About 800 people gathered at Hever Castle on Long Beach from noon to 2pm , three to four times that of the funeral cortege . ` < S > We are aware of written instructions from the copyright holder not to , in any way , mention Rosenberg ’s negative comments if they are relevant as indicated in the documents , ” eBay said in a statement . < S > It is now known that coffee and cacao products can do no harm on the body . < S > Yuri Zhirkov was in attendance at the Stamford Bridge at the start of the second half but neither Drogba nor Malouda was able to push on through the Barcelona defence . _

~~~
madsbuch
It is funny how google explores a mostly statistical approach. On the other
hand we have Grammatical Framework
([https://www.grammaticalframework.org/](https://www.grammaticalframework.org/))
which is much more along the line of the article posted.

