Word Vector Text Modulator

A contribution to 2016 NaNoGenMo

This repository contains the code and data necessary to generate Madame Bovary modulée, a novel based on the text by Flaubert but modified with word vectors derived from over 1300 nineteenth-century French texts.

Run the following command to produce the novel:

./transformText.py homme femme FlaubertMadameBovary.txt > MadameBovaryModulée.txt

A quick explanation of what's under the hood

Using gensim to build a word2vec model based on over 1300 French texts from the nineteenth century, the code takes a pair of words (e.g. "homme" and "femme") and a text as parameters to generate a modulated text. Each word in the original text is replaced by a word that is "most similar" to it according to the word pair. For instance, if "roi" is a word in the original text, it would be replaced thusly:

>>> model.most_similar(positive=['femme', 'roi'], negative=['homme'], topn=1)
[(u'reine', 0.8085041046142578)]

Handling verb conjugations and adjective agreements computationally in French is tricky but the code produces a mostly readable text needing grammatical polishing (a good exercise for students). The code can modulate any text against any pair of words.