Parody generators are computer programs which generate text that is
syntactically correct, but usually
meaningless, often in the
style
Style is a manner of doing or presenting things and may refer to:
* Architectural style, the features that make a building or structure historically identifiable
* Design, the process of creating something
* Fashion, a prevailing mode of clothing ...
of a technical paper or a particular writer. They are also called travesty generators and random text generators.
Their purpose is often
satirical
Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of shaming or e ...
, intending to show that there is little difference between the generated text and real examples.
Many work by using techniques such as
Markov chain
A Markov chain or Markov process is a stochastic model describing a sequence of possible events in which the probability of each event depends only on the state attained in the previous event. Informally, this may be thought of as, "What happe ...
s to reprocess real text examples; alternatively, they may be hand-coded. Generated texts can vary from
essay
An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal a ...
length to paragraphs and
tweets. (The term "quote generator" can also be used for software that randomly selects real quotations.)
Examples
*
Dissociated press
Dissociated press is a parody generator (a computer program that generates nonsensical text). The generated text is based on another text using the Markov chain technique. The name is a play on "Associated Press" and the psychological term dissoc ...
, an implementation of a Markov chaining algorithm
*
Postmodernism Generator
The Postmodernism Generator is a computer program that automatically produces "close imitations" of postmodernist writing. It was written in 1996 by Andrew C. Bulhak of Monash University using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random tex ...
, generates essays in the style of
post-structuralism
Post-structuralism is a term for philosophical and literary forms of theory that both build upon and reject ideas established by structuralism, the intellectual project that preceded it. Though post-structuralists all present different critique ...
*
SCIgen
SCIgen is a paper generator that uses context-free grammar to randomly generate nonsense in the form of computer science research papers. Its original data source was a collection of computer science papers downloaded from CiteSeer. All elements ...
, generates nonsensical
computer science
Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...
research papers
See also
*
Chatterbot
A chatbot or chatterbot is a software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live human agent. Designed to convincingly simulate the way a human would beha ...
*
Cleverbot
Cleverbot is a chatterbot web application that uses machine learning techniques to have conversations with humans. It was created by British AI scientist Rollo Carpenter. It was preceded by Jabberwacky, a chatbot project that began in 1988 and ...
*
Filler text
Filler text (also placeholder text or dummy text) is text that shares some characteristics of a real written text, but is random or otherwise generated. It may be used to display a sample of fonts, generate text for testing, or to spoof an e- ...
, meaningless text used as an example
*
Natural language generation
Natural language generation (NLG) is a software process that produces natural language output. In one of the most widely-cited survey of NLG methods, NLG is characterized as "the subfield of artificial intelligence and computational linguistics tha ...
*
Paper generator
A paper generator is computer software that composes scholarly papers in the style of those that appear in academic journals or conference proceedings. Typically, the generator uses technical jargon from the field to compose sentences that are gra ...
References
{{reflist, 2
Natural language generation