Need help with non-gaming program

[Arbiter of Wyrms]

A professor of mine is doing some very interesting research on naming trends in English and the feminization of names originally masculine in appendation.

There are a couple of things she wants to do for the next step of her research, but doesn't know how to do them and I told her what a great resource the gaming community, and particularly ENWorld are for such things.

If anybody here knows a little bit about programming, please tell me that what I'm asking for is reasonably achievable.

Here's what's needed:

1. A random name generator which uses certain rules (forthcoming) to create unique, English-sounding names.

2. A self-calculating table that will analyze an input name by certain (again, forthcoming) criteria, to rank both its femininity and masculinity, e.g., monosyllabic names get 1 masc. point. names which begin with vowels get 1 fem. point, et cetera.

Any help or advice you all can offer would be most appreciatted.

 

[XCorvis]

1. A random name generator which uses certain rules (forthcoming) to create unique, English-sounding names.

2. A self-calculating table that will analyze an input name by certain (again, forthcoming) criteria, to rank both its femininity and masculinity, e.g., monosyllabic names get 1 masc. point. names which begin with vowels get 1 fem. point, et cetera.

1. There are a couple name generators that take rules/criteria and spit out mostly correct sounding names. You'll have to take a closer look to see which ones are useful, but here's the one that looks the best: http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~pound/
He's also got a bunch of links to other name generators.

2. I'm willing to bet there are no free programs that do this - it's too niche. You'll have to write one. I've never seen a simple program that could determine syllables, so you're probably going to need to do this part by hand. Determining things like "ends with a vowel" seem simple at first, but then there are silent "e"s and a few special cases. English is not an easy language to program for. Long story short, this is possible but not easy. I'd get a student to do the grunt work and just do it by hand. You could also get a comp sci student to write a very simple script to take care of the easiest criteria and then the hand checking would only be on the more difficult ones, like syllables. A first-year CS student should be able to handle this. As long as your rules are very clear, there should be no human bias.

 

[Arbiter of Wyrms]

A first-year CS student should be able to handle this. As long as your rules are very clear, there should be no human bias.

So . . .

Any first-year computer science students out there willing to prove XCorvis right?

 

[dvvega]

Well I think that whoever is doing the work should be looking at languages like Prolog. At university I studied AI, and one of the units was natural language processing (take a sentence and spit out noun/verb/adverb/adjective/etc).

Prolog is a great language to handle something like this because it is essentially a rules based language, using tuples. So if you're looking for someone to help you, look for someone who's used to rules-based programming, and not a straight forward coder.

By the way, I'd be interested in seeing those rules when they're available.

D