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Icebox Breakfast Bot

This is a simple Mastodon bot, written in response to Mark Sample's excellent Just To Say Bot. The words that Mark's bot switches out in its generative process, this bot retains, and vice-versa. I made this as an experiment, to see why Mark's poetic and procedural choices mattered when he made his bot. What I discovered: Mark's implementation highlights the original poem's anti-capitalist underpinnings, evident in the narrator's begging forgiveness for unwelcome exploitation. My bot, on the other hand, is about all the whimsical scenarios you can think up about plums, iceboxes and breakfasting.

Experiment: Success!

I decided to put this bot on Mastodon, rather than Twitter, because its outputs are routinely longer than 140 characters, and I was too lazy to use PIL or something to composite an image. Also, I wanted to try to make a Mastodon bot.

Follow the bot here.

Running the bot

Install the required dependencies with pip (you may prefer to set up a virtual environment first):

pip install -r requirements.txt

Then run on the command line like so:

python bot.py CLIENT_ID CLIENT_SECRET ACCESS_TOKEN

... replacing CLIENT_ID, CLIENT_SECRET, and ACCESS_TOKEN with the corresponding bits of authentication as appropriate. Add to your crontab and voila!

Implementation

The core of this program are the lists of verbs (*_lemmas.txt in this repository) which are extracted from WordNet by searching for verbs with frames matching that of the original verb in the poem. This ensures a fundamental semantic similarity between the randomly-selected verb and the verb it replaces in the poem. A number of other, smaller word lists contribute to the program's lexicon (including a prepositions.json file later submitted to Corpora Project).

The complete_conjugation() function in generate.py uses Pattern's conjugate() function to produce a conjugated verb phrase (potentially incorporating an adverb), including the necessary auxiliary verbs, in past/present/future tenses and perfect/progressive aspects. The generate() function glues everything together using an elaborate template.

The Bot

The portion of the program that posts to Mastodon uses Mastodon.py. I've written an account/tutorial of obtaining credentials with Mastodon.py here. All the bot does is read the credentials from the command line, run the generate() function, and post the resulting string. Simple!

License

The source code in this repository is provided under the MIT license. See LICENSE.TXT for more information. The contents of *_lemmas.txt are derived from WordNet, and carry the following license:

WordNet Release 3.0

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