Fakelish – Fake English word generator

Re:Fakelish – Fake English word generator by mrbukkake on Sunday December 05, 2021 @02:23PM (#29452145)

Nice idea, naive implementation which leads to the output being unconvincing as hypothetical English words. I had a brief look and it seems to be proportionally selecting and sticking together sequences of letters sampled from English words (lib/word-probability.ts). This doesn't take into account syllable boundaries, the way the English spelling system maps between phones/phonemes and the phonotactic properties of English which is why the output looks unconvincing.

A better approach would be to use a markov chain built from sampling English text letter-by letter... an even better approach would be to build your stats from some source of English words in IPA transcription with syllable boundaries etc marked, then map from IPA to spelling via some kind of lookup table. We use a similar process in reverse in my research group for building datasets for doing Bayesian phylogenies of language families

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Re:Fakelish – Fake English word generator by KennyBlanken on Sunday December 05, 2021 @03:04PM (#29452587)

Clearly you are far more of a linguist than I am, but from such a perspective, I had a similar impression; I reloaded the page several times and none of the words struck me as being remotely plausibly English. These are worse than most Hollywood scifi words/names.

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Re:Fakelish – Fake English word generator by rlayton2 on Sunday December 05, 2021 @06:20PM (#29454347)

A significant improvement on letter-by-letter, but not that much harder, is to use n-grams: "two letters to predict the third" etc. Still not "industry grade", but the results start making more sense.

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Re:Fakelish – Fake English word generator by bruce343434 on Sunday December 05, 2021 @03:56PM (#29453166)

A letter-by-letter markov chain would lead to similar unconvincing results. As you said, vocal groups matter much more than single letters. If you know anything about korean, they actually group letters into characters that way. If one could build such a markov chain for English it would be very convincing I think.

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Re:Fakelish – Fake English word generator by mrbukkake on Sunday December 05, 2021 @04:13PM (#29453330)

You're right, I forgot that markov chains are memoryless

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Re:Fakelish – Fake English word generator by dminor on Sunday December 05, 2021 @09:17PM (#29455477)

I used a letter by letter Markov chain for this: http://password.supply/

The output is definitely not convincing as actual words (but reasonable for somewhat more memorable passwords).

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Re:Fakelish – Fake English word generator by rajansaini on Sunday December 05, 2021 @09:32PM (#29455559)

You should check out the VOLT paper, I think it would work well. It's a new technique for splitting up a vocabulary into subwords while minimizing entropy. These subwords could then be mixed and matched, maybe by a neural model, for better results.

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Re:Fakelish – Fake English word generator by lioeters on Sunday December 05, 2021 @10:46PM (#29455898)

Thank you for the reference. To save others a search, I believe this is the paper:

Vocabulary Learning via Optimal Transport for Neural Machine Translation - https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.15671

https://jingjing-nlp.github.io/volt-blog/

https://github.com/Jingjing-NLP/VOLT

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Re:Fakelish – Fake English word generator by themdonuts on Sunday December 05, 2021 @03:59PM (#29453199)

I got "minable" on my first try and found it impressive and surprised that it wasn't a word. After 3 other reloads nothing else came up.

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Re:Fakelish – Fake English word generator by tw04 on Sunday December 05, 2021 @04:51PM (#29453683)

Definitely not a fake word. Coal, for instance, is a minable resource.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/minable

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Re:Fakelish – Fake English word generator by phs318u on Sunday December 05, 2021 @09:02PM (#29455375)

Similarly, ”shitbin” was the second word on my first try, and I had to internet search to convince myself that it isn’t in fact a word.

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Re:Fakelish – Fake English word generator by thaumasiotes on Sunday December 05, 2021 @04:43PM (#29453612)

It definitely is a word, since "mine" is an existing verb.

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Re:Fakelish – Fake English word generator by Wistar on Monday December 06, 2021 @02:00AM (#29456994)

I got "episexic" and, well, I kind of like that one.

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