To mark the 20th anniversary of Friedman’s New York Times column, BuzzFeed has trained a robot to write like him.
On January 1, 1995 — twenty years ago, today — Thomas L. Friedman published his first “Foreign Affairs” column in the New York Times. Since then, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner has penned more than 1,700 dispatches, think-pieces, and taxi-driver interviews.All together, Friedman’s mighty corpus contains approximately 1.4 million words — enough language to train a robot to sound like him. So we did. The Tom Friedman Sentence Generator above uses a statistical technique known as a Markov chaining to generate random (if only somewhat plausible) sentences.
Want more random Friedmanesque pontifications? Follow @mot_namdeirf, a new Twitter bot that uses the same technique...MORE
If you just can't get enough Chomsky, here's the Chomskybot where you can generate Chomskytalk, without having to pay an MIT salary for the stuff:
I suggested that these results would follow from the assumption that the theory of syntactic features developed earlier appears to correlate rather closely with a parasitic gap construction.
On the other hand, relational information suffices to account for a stipulation to place the constructions into these various categories. Thus an important property of these three types of EC is rather different from an important distinction in language use. With this clarification, the natural general principle that will subsume this case is necessary to impose an interpretation on the traditional practice of grammarians.
We will bring evidence in favor of the following thesis: the appearance of parasitic gaps in domains relatively inaccessible to ordinary extraction may remedy and, at the same time, eliminate the extended c-command discussed in connection with....
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see also: WikiPedia -- Chomskybot
