I’m still tweaking the parameters for my computer-generated wine reviews.
Some computer-generated reviews:
“Delicious, deep flavours.”
While this is in no way funny, it’s sort of spectacular. Nobody actually used this exact phrase in the wine reviews. But somebody said “Delicious, deep and dusty. It should cost more.” And somebody else said “Rich deep flavours and a long finish.” And the computer sussed out that it could say “Delicious, deep flavours.” It even got the punctuation and capitalization correct. It’s fun to focus on the zaniest reviews the computer generates. But some of these boring ones are actually much more impressive.
“really, really solid quaffing red. It tastes True again. Nice wines. Thanks again. Good effort”
I like this one for all the reasons mentioned above. The simple parts are remarkably accurate. And the note that a wine tastes True again is amazing. You could actually get away with saying that in a review. Although I think if I had a greater respect for line breaks, there would have been a big gap betweent tastes and True. I’ll look into that.
“The 2008 Trah Lah Lah Lah Lah Lah Lah. No, sorry.”
Lest you think the computer only generates positive reviews of my wine… 😀 Aside from being a hilariously curt negative review, this also demonstrates one of the most amazing things about recursive analysis. My wine is called Trah Lah Lah. So the computer has about a 50/50 chance of saying the whole brand name any time it decides to say Trah. Trah is always followed by Lah. And Lah is followed by Lah about half the time. And by a period or another word about half the time. So you see a lot of Trah Lah and a lot of Trah Lah Lah in the generated reviews. But occasionally, you get lucky and the computer just strings together a ton of Lah Lah’s. If I were using trigrams, this probably wouldn’t happen as often. But for now, here we are. And actually, in this particular negative review, it sounds like they’re making fun of the name of the wine.. so it’s perfect!
“Gorgeous fruity New World Wines, with their ‘old fashioned’ flavour”
Program I used
I’m using Gibberizer for now. I might write something on my own later, but for now it’s all thanks to this beauty: http://code.google.com/p/gibberizer/
The settings are
- Read input as: Lines
- BatchSize: 1
- Similarity: 7
- Persistence: 5
- Disallow input echo
- Disallow duplicates
What changed since the last post?
If you read the last post on this subject, you’ll probably notice that these reviews are much more sensical. So what’s different?
First and foremost, I changed the data input. Instead of feeding the last 100 comments I received on Naked Wines, I submitted only tasting notes for the 2008 Trah Lah Lah. That’s 113 reviews. They tend to be a little shorter than comments, so the data file is about the same length, but all the language is about drinking wine. This means that the computer generates fewer comments about technical aspects of the website like the MarketPlace and the vineshare program we’re running.
Don’t get me wrong. I’d love to generate comments of that nature too. But I just need way more data for that to work. Tasting notes are easier because even the real ones sound a bit like gibberish… and people often get so drunk while tasting the wine that the reviews tend to be a bit slurred by the end.
I should also mention that lots of the reviews are still total gibberish.. for example:
“A bit tannins as well. As a Rhode Islander to breathing” for a good 🙂 will buy again.”
Work in progress!