naive-spoonerizer

Hypothesis

Contra Pressey (2014), we hypothesize that levenshtein-swapper was not a viable approach for generating Spoonerisms.

Apparatus

• Python 2.7.6 (probably works with older versions too)
• A texts, possibly a pre-cleaned text file previously downloaded from Project Gutenberg

Method

• Read all the sentences from the text, arranged into sentences.
• In each sentence, find a pair of words and swap their initial consonant clusters.

Observations

It doesn't always pick the best words from the sentence, but if the sentence isn't too long, it can get lucky. Here is an excerpt from "The Communist Manifesto" passed through this:

The feudal system of industry, under which mindustrial production was onopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took plits ace. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the lace of division of fabour in each single workshop. Meantime the markets kept ever growing, e demand thever rising. Even manufacture so longer nufficed.

Future work

Lots of little constraints could be added to this: prefer words with non-zero length consonant clusters, prefer close-together words, etc.

I think I shall try a more advanced approach rather than optimizing this one, though, at least right now.