wordplay utilities

I wrote a couple of wordplay programs. One generates an acrostic for a particular word and a rough theme, and the other generates rhyming pairs of words on a given theme. They make use of distributional semantic vector spaces, of course.

Here are examples of the rhymes it comes up with. These are chosen by hand from a list of about 30 candidates:

Examples

cowboy: colorado desperado

llama: coat goat

Star_Wars: groovy movie, halloween onscreen, iconic hypersonic, cute reboot, droid overjoyed, etc...

friar: yeast priest, barbarian seminarian

spaceship: moon balloon

pillow: head bed

trampoline: elastic gymnastic

rocking chair: knitter sitter

weed: vegetation eradication

novel: fiction depiction

juice: dilute fruit

cookie: naughty biscotti

Oreo: black snack

orca: dalmation cetacean

Mad Max: futuristic sadistic

oven: boiler broiler, roaster toaster

clock: chimes times

stopwatch: clocks jocks, elapse laps

dragon: wizard lizard

Lost_Ark: horror explorer

brain: logical neurological

Lincoln: desegregation oration

Beatles: guitars superstars

honey: bees cheese

flower: bloom perfume, frilly lily

Clinton: she nominee

sun: skylight twilight

Bollywood: Hindi indie, Delhi telly

An interesting question to explore is whether different people prefer the same choices, and what exactly it is that separates the preferred choices to the rejected ones. Probably the most important thing is that both words contribute to a true description-- there were plenty of other "bee" rhymes it came up with for honey, but only the one for a food product produced by an animal seemed like a good fit. That's the minimum to be acceptable, but wittiness goes farther-- it requires some non-obvious insight.

I used the CMU pronunciation dictionary for the rhyming patterns. It has a few oddities (sci rhymes with flee?) but overall I was very pleased with it.