I have recently started developing mobile Java applications for the Android platform. Currently I'm working on a number of linguistic programs and intend to create language learning tools in the future.
 | Nonsense |
Nonsense generates arbitrary sentences using template frames, populated from a collection of words comprising eight parts of speech. It can create literally millions of possible sentence combinations.
The results are grammatically correct but typically meaningless. The application works by reading in the structure of an ordinary grammatical sentence, inserting at each position, a word from the specified part of speech selected randomly from an array.
For example, the frame:
VERB DETERMINER NOUN PREPOSITION ADJECTIVE NOUN
e.g. Kick the ball with considerable skill.
Might generate:
Sing a pie over purple normality.
The app uses the following parts of speech: NOUN, VERB, ADJECTIVE, ADVERB, PRONOUN, CONJUNCTION, DETERMINER and PREPOSITION. At present all of the sentence frames/ words correspond to the imperative mood, so that the results appear like surreal commands and deranged proverbs.
The concept is similar in principle to Chomsky's famous 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously', as well as such games as Mad Libs and Exquisite Corpse, except with the elements being selected by computer program rather than people.
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Implementation details:
The app reads the word resources in from XML when it is launched, holding an array for each part of speech. When the button is pressed, the program creates a nonsense sentence by choosing one of the sentence frames at random, then inserting a randomly selected word for the appropriate part of speech at each position in the sentence. The program also keeps track of information about the currently displayed sentence such as the frame used to generate it, available on long-press of the sentence itself.
I created the app because I enjoy gibberish, particularly when it appears at first glance to be almost sensible (hence the reason the app uses standard grammatical structures and real words). Also, I intend to develop linguistic android apps in the future and thought this would be a relatively easy one to start off with.
Hopefully the daftness means that you don't have to be a linguistic geek to get some fun out of it; the grammatical stuff is there if you want it..
In the near future I intend to develop additional English grammar/ language learning tools for the Android platform (i.e. things that are useful rather than daft).
Anyway, here are some links to pertinent wikipedia pages for anyone interested:
The Nonsense app is available via the Android Market
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