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000066_icon-group-sender_Mon Oct 7 16:25:42 2002.msg
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Return-Path: <icon-group-sender>
Received: (from root@localhost)
by baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU (8.11.1/8.11.1) id g97NPGQ26268
for icon-group-addresses; Mon, 7 Oct 2002 16:25:16 -0700 (MST)
Message-Id: <200210072325.g97NPGQ26268@baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU>
Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2002 12:51:48 -0700 (PDT)
From: Mark Kot <kot@amath.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: icon
To: trutkin@physics.clarku.edu
Cc: icon-group@cs.arizona.edu
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
Status: RO
>Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2002 10:56:49 -0400 (EDT)
>From: Taybin Rutkin <trutkin@physics.clarku.edu>
>X-Sender: trutkin@planck.clarku.edu
>To: Mark Kot <kot@hyak.amath.washington.edu>
>cc: icon-group@CS.Arizona.EDU
>Subject: Re: icon
>
>On Sat, 5 Oct 2002, Mark Kot wrote:
>
>> (4) iconcise
>>
>> Iconcise is a program to look for verbose or trite
>> phrases in my writing
>
>How does this work? It looks for sentences over and under a certain
>length?
iconcise is actually based on a handbook of common
verbose phrases that also recommends substitutions.
I haven't posted the program for the simple reason
that I don't want to cross over from ``fair use''
to copyright infringement (since the program, in
effect, implements the book).
What makes Icon handy for this program is (a) generators
and (b) nice easy-to-use structures. Generators allow
one to quickly generate all of the manifestations
of verbose phrases. Basicly, the program consists of many
lines like
every insert(T, "by " || ("itself"|"themselves"), ["alone"])
every insert(T, ("don't"|"didn't") || " pay attention to", ["ignore"])
or even longer lines like
every insert(T, ("declining"|"decreasing"|"diminishing"|"dwindling") || " " || ("number"|"quantity"), ["decreasingly",
"few", "fewer and fewer"])
that create table elements with the bad phrase as the key and a list of
possible substitutions as the corresponding table elements.
The program also creates a set of verbose phrases (SVP):
SVP := set()
every insert(SVP, key(T))
The program generates sentences from the input
(see sentence from senten1 in the Icon library),
creates all of the multiword substrings in each sentence,
and checks whether these substrings are members in the set.
If the the phrase is in the set it uses the table to make
suggestions. The program proceeds sentence by sentence.
It sounds complicated, but it actually exectutes quite
quickly. Indeed, it seems instantaneous (but that may
say something about the number of verbose phrases in
my writing).
Mark
>> (5) izipf
>>
>> Izipf is a suite of programs that I wrote to ana-
>> lyze the diversity of postings to newsgroups.
>> Some of the programs analyze header information
>> from archived newsgroups. Other programs simulate
>> the growth and evolution of newsgroups using sim-
>> ple stochastic processes. (The resulting analyses
>> can be seen in an article, ``Zipf's law and the
>> diversity of biology newsgroups'', that will be
>> coming out in the journal Scientometrics early in
>> 2003).
>
>Is this like the above program, but run on USENET and with a history
>mechanism?
>
>Taybin
>--
>http://www.piratesvsninjas.com
>
>