Perl for poets

Perl is a programming language that has been around since the late 80’s. In that time it has established a loyal following and reputation as a useful tool for the manipulation and analysis of textual data. For those new to programming, the syntax of Perl is relatively simple. It is also a very tolerant language in that there are many ways in the language to perform a desired task. Because of these facts, Perl is an ideal language for poets interested in using the computer to transform, analyse and generate text.

Below are links to information about the language, books on learning and using Perl, links to various distributions for download and a long list of various Perl modules one can download to add functionality to their programs. Experiment and have fun !

UPDATED October 19/2006 - Added links to some Natural Langauge Processing (NLP) Perl libraries

 

About Perl
Perl FAQ
Learning Perl
The Perl Cookbook

 

Perl distributions/downloads
Microsoft Windows	ActiveState’s Perl distribution
Mac OS X	Perl is a standard feature on OS X, but this document may be useful if you wish to upgrade your existing version.
Mac OS 9	MacPerl
Linux	Perl is a standard feature on nearly all Linux distributions.

 

Perl poetry articles/programs
Ron Starr’s poem tools	A collection of perl programs for generating poetry.
Searching for rhymes with Perl	A Perl Journal article (in PDF format) describing how to construct a perl program for generating rhymes.

 

Perl Natural Language Processing  (NLP) Libraries
Dan Melamed's NLP Research Software Library	160+ perl scripts for comparing, calculating, extracting, tokenizing, sorting words.
CLAIR project	"The Clair library is intended to simplify a number of generic tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR). Its architecture also allows for external software to be plugged in with very little effort." It's written in PERL, has a nice variety of features for web search, indexing, extraction, summarization, statistics and clustering and looks to be quite easy to use.
Computational Linguistics Toolset	A set of tools for doing Permutation Statistics on corpora, and for other computational linguistics tasks (like corpus cleaning, examination, and sensing using WordNet).

 

Perl Modules	Description
Lingua::Wordnet	Perl extension for accessing and manipulating WordNet databases. WordNet is a lexical database which can act as a combination of dictionary/thesaurus. It has a rich set of lexical relationships between each word. A very useful resource.
Lingua::LinkParser	Perl module implementing the Link Grammar Parser by Sleator, Temperley and Lafferty at CMU.
Lingua::EN::Gender	Inflect pronouns for gender
Lingua::EN::Fathom	readability and general measurements of English text (num words/sentends/text lines etc..)
Lingua::EN::Infinitive	Determine the infinitive form of a conjugated word
Lingua::EN::Keywords	Automatically extracts keywords from text
Lingua::EN::Nickname	Genealogical nickname matching (Liz=Beth)
Lingua::EN::Sentence	Module for splitting text into sentences.
Lingua::EN::Summarize	A simple tool for summarizing bodies of English text.
Lingua::EN::Syllable	Routine for estimating syllable count in words
Lingua::Rhyme	MySQL-based rhyme-lookups.
Lingua::Stem	Stemming of words. Stemming is a process of word shortening which is useful when creating search indexes for the words in a text.
Lingua::Translate	Translate text from one language to another (via Altavista).
Class::MakeMethods::Template::TextBuilder	Basic text substitutions (great for text generation !)
DBIx::FullTextSearch	Indexing documents with MySQL as storage (make your own search engine!)
HTML::FromText	Create an HTML file from a plain text file.
HTML::FormatText	Create a plain text file from an HTML file.
Text::Aligner	Justify strings to various alignment styles.
Text::Affixes	Prefixes and suffixes analisys of text
Text::Brew	An implementation of the Brew edit distance. This can be used to measure how "similar" two strings of text are.
Text::Autoformat	Automatic and manual text wrapping and reformating formatting
Text::Banner	Create text resembling Unix ‘banner’ command (great for birthday parties !)
Text::Bastardize	A corruptor of innocent text ( great for corporate reports !?!? )
Text::Contraction	Find possible expansions for a contraction.
Text::DeDuper	Detect similar (near-duplicate) documents based on their text.
Text::DeSupercite	Remove supercite quotes and other non-standard quoting from text
Text::Document	A text document subject to statistical analysis (has document similarity functions !)
Text::DoubleMetaphone	Phonetic encoding of words. See also Text::Metaphone and Text::Soundex.
Text::ExtractWords	Extracts words from text.
Text::Forge	A templating system for creating dynamic web pages.
Text::Greeking	Generates meaningless text that creates the illusion of the finished document.
Text::Lorem	Generate random Latin looking text.
Text::Metaphone	A modern soundex. Phonetic encoding of words. See also Text::Soundex, and Text::DoubleMetaphone
Text::Ngrams	Flexible Ngram analysis (for characters, words, and more). N-grams are useful for generating text which mimic the style of another text.
Text::Echelon	Create random Echelon related words. Use this to generate words suitable for achieving a status as a "person of heightened interest" from any number of national security agencies.
Text::Flowchart	ASCII Flowchart maker (very cool….)
Text::GenderFromName	Guess the gender of a "Christian" first name.
Text::Graphics	A text graphics rendering toolkit (ASCII graphics… !)
Text::ParseWords	Parse text into an array of tokens or array of arrays.
Text::Pluralize	simple pluralization routine
Text::English	Porter’s stemming algorithm. See also Lingua::Stem..
Text::Munge::Vowels	Strips vowels spaces from words and phrases to shorten the length of simple text messages. This one may be hard to find.
Text::Soundex	Implementation of the Soundex Algorithm as Described by Knuth. Useful for finding similar sounding words. See also Text::DoubleMetaphone and Text::Metaphone.