On the Simulation of Postmodernism and Mental Debility using Recursive Transition Networks

Recursive transition networks are an abstraction related to context free grammars and nite state automata It is possible to generate random meaningless and yet realistic looking text in genres de ned using recursive transition networks often with quite amusing results One genre in which this has been accomplished is that of academic papers on postmodernism In his book G odel Escher Bach An Eternal Golden Braid Douglas Hofstadter demonstrated a method of generating meaningless but grammati cally correct English language text Hofstadter illustrated this method with an example a selection of fragments of text ten of which were generated using a computer program and three which were taken from a journal titled Art Language and a challenge to the reader to identify which sentences were generated arti cially The challenge is made interesting by the fact that the lan guage of the excerpts from the journal is so dense and jargon laden that to the casual observer it does not make any more sense than the computer generated fragments It was this that inspired me initially to write a program to generate arti cial travesties of such writing Recursive Transition Networks There are several approaches to generating travesties of natural language text by computer Perhaps the two most common approaches areMarkov models and recursive transition networks The approach of using Markov models consists of analysing sample text in a genre by breaking it up into units typically words or characters and building up tables of the probabilities of units following other units To generate text one performs a random walk through these tables starting at a unit selecting the following unit randomly with respect to the probabilities discovered doing so again and so on The advantages of this model are that it is automatic the models can be built algorithmically from input and can have delity proportional to the number of prior units considered the degree of the model However this is a dumb model it does not model sentence preposition adjective