The goal of my RWET final was to produce something that referenced current news headlines but incorporated text from fictional worlds like Star Wars and Adventure Time.
Things I was thinking about while working on this:
- I mostly read news
- Headlines tend to favor “man bites dog” narrative
- Increasing concern with “fake” news and propaganda
- Fire hose of news online
- Escapism
I mainly used the Spacy natural language processing library to accomplish this although I tried a number of different approaches.
Part of speech replacement
I first tried to get all the parts of speech in a headline and simply replace that part of speech with a corresponding word from a fantasy world corpus.
search heart item is of Spider ‘s placed position that Man is
K’un created during cobblestone stair , ” clear heroes ‘s
antidote trick texture from career ‘s Overdrive woods ‘s
able time prey : same Lun or Weasley host kissed
unpredictable areas ‘ different editions casting to to opening temptation toxins
who lightning window piece.[255 . each marks join two Antilles In him
Mushrooms Malfoy the complete table what became arrows , other twin crafted
Spider ( Man ] obtained … side as the police , face open when ‘ pickaxe powers told
also able
darkness confronted the could spell only academic for portal ” get he all swap ” ; Anti is Sinister , Snape vs electron source
The result here wasn’t very readable. If you try you can see the headline-like structure but it became clear that simply replacing parts of speech wasn’t a great way to get consistent results.
The code here shows the process after pulling in the Headlines from NewsAPI:
Noun Chunks
The next thing I tried was replacing noun chunks from the headlines with noun chunks from the fantasy text
the untrained Jedi quits as Joyce’s forced relocation to Armidale looms
Mustafar falling because of surging home prices
Monkey (Magic) explained: Ahead of the reboot, find out why Malfoy were so obsessed
There are you in South Sudan’s war
Philippe Poutou builds rainbows
a Jedi face exploitation in Greece
Why does Le Pen get Purchasers from young voters?
Take a tour of Parker
China takes his time toward building a large space station
Hang out with a hologram of Harry to VR
Why understanding the genetics of Melissa isn’t much help
These results were much more readable but didn’t diverge from the original headline enough for my taste. There were also lots of instances where the replacement didn’t make sense.
The Code:
Entity Extraction and Subjects of Verbs
Following this I tried Spacy’s entity extraction and subjects of verb extraction.
Only With Perfect Vision Can Match These Fonts
Here’s Happened When We Tried Starbucks’ New Unicorn Frapp
This Little Girl’s Whole Squad Came To Her Soccer Game And the Kingpin Are Seriously Obsessed With It
Skywalker have a new plan to repeal Obamacare — and here it is
looks like he’ll miss another deadline on another promise today
will soon clobber beer sales, Wall Street says
Full interview with former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin on A Jack-O-Lantern, crafted by placing a pumpkin above a torch in the crafting
Emperor Palpatine career comes to a swift end amid growing sexual harassment claims
Call of Duty Dev Sets the Stage for New Zombies Map: Tatooine
Emperor Still Has Up to 3 Tons of Chemical Weapons
Chaffetz will leave behind Oversight panel he used to investigate Star Wars Publications Timeline
MSNBC ‘Counter-Terrorism Analyst’ Calls for the Death Star
These were generally the most readable and close to what I originally wanted. However I felt again, like the original narrative in the headlines was too obvious. The other problem is that they were usually funny – which in the context of gas attacks, deportations and other real violence felt inappropriate. I could have screened out certain headlines or news sources but to me that would have compromised the core of the work.
Some weird Root/children replacements idea
After trying things that resulted in non-sense and others that were too real. I though I should try to dig a but deeper into sentence structure and bring more of the fantasy text in. What I tried to do was look for the root word of each headline, Identify the children of that root word, identify the part of speech that the child word is, and replace whatever clause it is in with a clause from the fantasy text. What this essentially does is replace almost the entire original headline except the root word or phrase. The results are somewhat non-sensical but much more readable than my first attempt at replacing with Parts of speech.
-Stone-
Stone, described in the walkthrough above, Kart -Clay- Cameos, etc
Peter, which caused Spider-Man to brutally beat Norman, which was all caught on a hidden camera in his house is into
it to help Draco
These protests consider as follows
Analysis | Trump’s claim that Korea ‘then used to save Jameson’s astronaut son, John Jameson from an accident in a deviated space capsule
Skywalker Indeed killed ―Luke Skywalker, during the operations on Er’Kit[src]
At some point after becoming a Commander of his own, you won’t fall off the edge of
blocks, which can again be useful for building tall structures
Bookseller Barnes and Noble says Turtle Princess brings her food to her hobo camp
Luke Skywalker’s she has a talent for singing.
Harry, equates Peter’s body
coal opens at his apartment death, he had a vision of Kenobi, who told him to seek the teachings of Yoda in the Dagobah system.[9]
At first I was disappointed with this. I thought the structure of the headline would be clearer, but as I read it outloud loud I liked this more and more. To me it sounds like someone reading the newspaper aloud but constantly interrupting with their own commentary. I liked this blend of seemingly factual statements with opinions and tangents. As suggested in class, I think I will try to separate out different news sources for the final reading in order to isolate the styles of headlines.
Sources
The news comes out of the NewsAPI which pulled from tons of sites like NYtimes to Ars Technica.
The fantasy text I used primarily came from Wikia articles about different characters or books related to Adventure Time, Star Wars, Spiderman, and Minecraft.
— UPDATE —
For the final performance I chose three distinct news sources and limited the clause replacement so that the target and replacer are roughly the same length. Here is a sample of what the new output looks like:
Today April 27th:
A Respectable News Source
ESPN Layoffs: the Second Wizarding War Sheds out of leather,
White House Proposes Slashing Tax Rates, accidentally Aiding Certain
Winners and Flowers With great powers
In Ann Coulter’s Speech Battle, Items Once -Door- Doors are Emboldened
the Tablet Says Before he could travel to Coruscant
Maul Cases, -Obsidian- Obsidian, which has a dark purple texture,
Justices encouraged by Notch (except where his own code is redistributed),
SandMJ Ron Plan— Johnnie Lumpy Space Princess and in the crafting grid
Harry Peter Peter Ways across a box addressed to Skywalker
Peter carrying the box, Launches all Zombie Pigmen in the area
Some Millennial Clickbate
Secondary Is an errand for Admiral Ackbar, Skywalker.
19 Draco’s Detour “WHY ARE YOU WORRYING ABOUT YOU-KNOW-WHO?
can him Solve Courtney Johnson about the D.A meetings.
the Hogwarts library Might Explain Why Rose Wouldn’t Let Jack On The Board With Her At The End
This Word to kidnap Peter Sand- Soul sand
I Quit Sugar For 30 Days And That Is Organa became
also A hard Thorfinn Rowle can Get More Than 75% into bread
three different categories of colour furiously Do from this recipe
19 he inquired if Vader was truly his father
50 Tweets That Show not possible Jedi Master Yoda Are
That Hateful Blog
Report: the Felix Felicis ―Shara Bey and Luke Skywalker[src] In the battle’s aftermath
Voldemort DoesNATURAL BLOCKS– -Stone- Stone, described in the walkthrough above,
Sen Perdue on Trump’s First 100 Days: Consumer Confidence Is the Highest itis Been In an attempt to save him
Peter House; there is an unseasonal mist pressing against the window panes.
Arsonist Peter Parker (Earth-616) from Amazing Spider-Man Vol 1 1 0001
Delingpole— Trump Will Use Art of the Deal to Kill Paris Climate Treaty
Nebula Decries the Hippogriff attacks Snape, who leaves Harry behind and escapes with Draco Malfoy
Exclusive; As Peter continued to live on his own,
Wool Levin: a different block appear in the output slot to the right of the grid
New Sheriff in Town: THE Madame Web Days to CIA agents Richard and Mary Parker