Chomskybot

The Chomskybot is a program that generates paragraphs which appear similar to those in the corpus of Noam Chomsky's linguistic 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" managerese —i.e., the language of business management. The phrases from Chomsky were originally collected by John F. Sowa, the program was redesigned by Anthony Aristar and John Lawler, 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 sentences to a paragraph; 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
• SCIgen, a computer program that randomly generates computer science research papers
• Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

External links

• Perl Chomskybot
• Perl source code
• Ruby Chomskybot source code
• Chomskybot FAQ
• John F. Sowa's home page
• Kevin McGowan's home page
• John M. Lawler's home page