Insoluble

My entry for NaNoGenMo 2018 was a program that wrote a novel, Angela’s Claustrum, by “Salvatore”, using Insoluble, the novel I wrote myself for NaNoWriMo 2015, as a template.

1. Segment: the software, written in C and Ruby, splits the whole Gutenberg corpus into chapters, paragraphs and sentences, tagging each sentence as exposition or dialogue.
2. Pick keywords: for each sentence of the template, it selects keywords using normalised pointwise mutual information learned from Gutenberg.
3. Generate: it produces hundreds of candidate sentences around those keywords and keeps the best one.
4. Repair: further models restore punctuation and capitalisation, turning THEIR LAUGHTER OF WOOD OF THE SILENT LAUGHTER… into “Their laughter of wood of the silent laughter, but the rush burst away northwards, following.”

The result is strange and oddly evocative.