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Work the Shell - Mad Libs Generator, Tweaks and Hacks

Issue 205

From Issue #205
May 2011

Jul 31, 2011  By Dave Taylor
 in
We continue building a Mad Libs tool and slowly come to realize that it's a considerably harder problem than can be neatly solved in a 20-line shell script.
But, There Are Problems

Looking back at what we've done, however, there are a couple problems. The most important is that although we have a tool that identifies part of speech, it's not particularly accurate, because it turns out that many words can be identified properly based only on their use and context. A grammarian already will have identified some of the problems above! Even more than that, I suspect that however much we hack the script to make smarter word selections and identify context, the fact is that creating a really great Mad Libs involves human intervention. Given an arbitrary sentence, there are words that can be replaced to make it funny, and others that just make it incomprehensible.

Now, it wouldn't be too much to have a somewhat less ambitious program that understood a Mad Libs type of markup language and prompted as appropriate, reassembling the results after user input. Perhaps “The <noun> in <place> stays mainly in the plain”, which turns into: 

Noun (person, place or thing):
Noun (a place):

But, that I will leave as (ready for it?) an exercise for the reader!

Note: Mad Libs is a registered trademark of Penguin Group USA.

Dave Taylor has been hacking shell scripts for a really long time, thirty years. He's the author of the popular Wicked Cool Shell Scripts and can be found on Twitter as @DaveTaylor and more generally at www.DaveTaylorOnline.com.

______________________

Dave Taylor has been hacking shell scripts for over thirty years. Really. He's the author of the popular "Wicked Cool Shell Scripts" and can be found on Twitter as @DaveTaylor and more generally at www.DaveTaylorOnline.com.

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