Inspiration
We wanted an easy, fun way to spoof up our english essays.
What it does
It substitutes words for their longest relevant synonym.
How we built it
Blood, Tears, Toil, and Sleep Deprivation.
Challenges we ran into
We registered a unique domain for the project but DNS never finished resolving, so Anya had to transfer the entire site to a domain she already owned. Will had issues resolving the words with multiple meanings. We also ran into an issue with browsers caching the text files, so it's hard to use the same session for different text submissions.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
It actually works! And the bad coding shortcuts and practices were minimal. The website resolves and is fully functional.
What we learned
Neural networks are really, really hard, especially with regards to grammar. We initially wanted to build and implement a neural network that understood grammar, but realized 1) we couldn't possibly generate enough test cases to train it, and 2) They're really, really complex.
What's next for Semantics
We might eventually implement a neural network or a machine learning algorithm to improve word choice, and a better website would be a quality upgrade. For now I think we're pretty satisfied with the algorithm's humor value and (occasionally) good substitutions.
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