zombie_writer

ZombieWriter

ZombieWriter is a Ruby gem that will enable users to generate news articles by aggregating paragraphs from other sources.

While you have to provide the paragraphs, ZombieWriter will arrange the paragraphs into different articles for you to use and edit to your heart's content. You may choose between Machine Learning (Latent Semantic Analysis and k-means clustering) or Randomization.

For more information about how this program works, please read the blog post Using Machine Learning To Generate Human-Readable News Articles.

Installation

Command Line

gem install zombie_writer

Gemfile

gem 'zombie_writer'

Additional Requirements

ZombieWriter also requires GNU GSL and rb-gsl (a Ruby gem that interfaces with the GSL library). Please see Issue #5 for more information.

Usage

First, decide whether you want to use ZombieWriter::MachineLearning or ZombieWriter::Randomization. ZombieWriter::MachineLearning uses Latent Semantic Analysis and k-means clustering to group your content into different articles, while Randomization simply pick random paragraphs to put in each article.

ZombieWriter::MachineLearning has the potential of producing better-quality articles, but is slightly slower than ZombieWriter::Randomization.

To create a MachineLearning zombie...

zombie = ZombieWriter::MachineLearning.new

And to create a Randomization zombie...

zombie = ZombieWriter::Randomization.new

Then, once you have your zombie, add your content.

zombie.add_string(content: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.",
sourcetext: "Cicero's Great Speech On Ethics",
sourceurl: "http://example.com/lorem-ipsum")

In the generated article, this content will appear in Markdown as:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.--[Cicero's Great Speech On Ethics](http://example.com/lorem-ipsum)

If your content is located in an external file, such as a CSV file, you can easily automate the process of adding strings to your zombie.

Content,SourceText,SourceUrl
"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.","Cicero's Great Speech On Ethics","http://example.com/lorem-ipsum"
"Leverage agile frameworks.","Corporate Ipsum","http://www.cipsum.com/"
"Bacon ipsum dolor amet.","Bacon Ipsum","http://baconipsum.com/"
"Pork belly seitan photo booth.","Hipster Ipsum","https://hipsum.co/"

require 'smarter_csv'

array_of_paragraphs = SmarterCSV.process("ipsum_quotes.csv")

array_of_paragraphs.each do |paragraph|
  zombie.add_string(paragraph)
end

Once you have finished giving your Zombie all the strings it needs, tell it to generate your articles. It will save them as an array, which you can then save elsewhere. Each article is numbered, starting from zero, and is also given an headline (which is the "most important sentence" in the article). All articles are formatted using Markdown.

array = zombie.generate_articles

File.open("articles.md", "w+") do |f|
  array.each { |article| f.puts("#{article}\n\n- - -\n") }
end

Here's an example article that might be generated by ZombieWriter:

## 0 - Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.---[Cicero's Great Speech On Ethics](http://example.com/lorem-ipsum)

Bacon ipsum dolor amet.---[Bacon Ipsum](http://baconipsum.com/)

Leverage agile frameworks.---[Corporate Ipsum](http://www.cipsum.com/)

Pork belly seitan photo booth.---[Hipster Ipsum](https://hipsum.co/)

- - -

Citation

You do not need to provide sourcetext or sourceurl. If you exclude the sourceurl, the article will only display the sourcetext as citation (with no hyperlink).

zombie.add_string(content: "This is some Lorem filler that my friend made up.",
sourcetext: "tra38's anonymous friend")

This is some Lorem filler that my friend made up.---tra38's anonymous friend

If you exclude the sourcetext, the article will use the sourceurl, while providing a hyperlink as well.

zombie.add_string(content: "Zombie ipsum reversus ab viral inferno.",
sourceurl: "http://www.zombieipsum.com")

Zombie ipsum reversus ab viral inferno.---[http://www.zombieipsum.com](http://www.zombieipsum.com)

If you exclude both the sourcetext and the sourceurl, the article will display no citation. This is useful for situations where you don't need to provide any citation metadata (such as if you have handwritten the content).

zombie.add_string(content: "This is filler text that I invented.")

This is filler text that I invented.

Real-World Examples

NaNoGenMo articles

The "National Novel Generation Month" competition has generated a lot of commentary on the Internet. Rather than hand-writing out new commentary, why not reuse existing ones?

• Articles generated using ZombieWriter::MachineLearning
• Articles generated using ZombieWriter::Randomization

In both instances, we used this CSV file as source data.

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment. Run bundle exec zombie_writer to use the gem in this directory, ignoring other installed copies of this gem.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org.

Contributing

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/tra38/ZombieWriter/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.

Credits

The name is inspired by the term "Philosphical Zombie". According to Wikipedia, a P-Zombie is "a hypothetical being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except that it lacks conscious experience, qualia, or sentience". AI is the closest we can get to building a P-Zombie of our own.

The logo for this project was generated using MarkMaker.