RinkWorks: Stupid Emails: I don't write fanfic

447. I don't write fanfic

To:  sam@rinkworks.com
Subject:  Name Generator / Regular Expressions
Date:  Wed, 09 Aug 2006 12:59:33 +0700

Hi Sam,
I don't write fanfic (in fact, I can't write at all), but I'm quite
interested in your name generator. I'm a college student currently on
internship with a nonprofit group in Thailand. We're making
dictionary-creation software for minority language groups in SE Asia
(and hopefully the rest of the world as well). I have just built a
framework for testing word generation based on an alphabet, and two word
generators, one designed to do poorly, and one to be completely random
as a benchmark. The reason for this is make lists of real or
close-to-real words that will remind villagers writing word lists of
words they may have missed.
The next task is to write a gen based on regular expressions (with
consonants, vowels, diacritics, etc...Asian languages can get pretty
complicated), and I'm having a lot of trouble finding help and/or
examples of generation based on regex. I haven't ever used them before
myself, and it seems that the information floating around is on
pattern-matching, not creation. Eventually, we'll probably go to a
neural net, but that project will go to someone else, and later. :-) In
the meantime, any help you can give would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Sounds like a barrel of laughs to me. But I'm strictly a, uh, FANFIC guy.