Mark Liberman's reference to French naturally made me think of Postmodernism, the French revenge for Jerry Lewis. One of the odder varieties of natural language technology is random text generation, and one of the more interesting examples of this is the Postmodernism Generator, which I urge you to check out. A description can be found in A. C. Bulhak's paper "On the simulation of postmodernism and mental debility using recursive transition networks", 96/264, Dept Computer Science Technical Reports, Dept Computer Science, Monash Univ, Melbourne Australia, 1-12, 12pp. Technical report CS 96/264, which can be downloaded, in gzipped Postscript, here . The title is perhaps a bit redundant, but it's interesting.
Posted by Bill Poser at December 15, 2003 07:45 PM