As part of a project for a Natural Language Processing class last spring, I wrote a program that generated names of fake TED Talks.  The goal was to get the generator to produce titles that made sense using only the information contained  in the pre-existing titles available online; I didn’t want to write a bunch of Mad-Lib style titles manually and just drop in buzzwords.  It forced me to think about some quirky problems that pop up when you try to get computers to understand and produce natural language and I wrote about some of them on the blog I don’t update often enough.

One of these days I’m actually going to put the generator itself online so you can all play with it.