Installer: http://MrFeinberg.com/haikufinder-1.1.zip
*
* REQUIRES NLTK, THE NATURAL LANGUAGE TOOLKIT
* http://www.nltk.org/download
*
A Python hack to find "haikus" in English text. For the purposes of this
module, a "haiku" is one or more complete sentences that, together, can be
broken into groups of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. Each canididate haiku line,
and then the entire haiku, has to make it through a few heuristics to
filter out constructions that are likely to scan awkwardly (like verb
phrases split across lines). Since this code doesn't really try to
understand the texts, it might throw away a few legitimate phrases, and it
certainly lets through some bad ones.
Any improvements would be welcomed.
The license, found in license.txt, is "modified BSD".
Example usage:
text = open("ulysses.txt", "r").read()
haikus = HaikuFinder(text).find_haikus()
for haiku in haikus:
print haiku[0]
print " %s" % haiku[1]
print haiku[2]
print
If you find that the HaikuFinder doesn't seem to recognize some word
you're using, or is counting its syllables incorrectly, you can say
HaikuFinder.add_word('shmeggegge', 3)
HaikuFinder.add_word('kvetch', 1)
haikus = HaikuFinder('''
For this I should stay? To hear some shmeggegge kvetch about his lawsuit?
''').find_haikus()
If you like, you can fork the project, modify the custom.dict, and submit a pull
request. I'll accept all useful dictionary additions.
