carkov

This is a library for creating and walking simple markov chains. It is meant for things like text generators (such as ebooks bots and word generators) and thus is not 'mathetematically correct'. It has some tools for doing text analysis but more are planned in the future (stubs exist to illustrate some plans, see TODO.md).

Command line interface

This library includes a command line interface to analyzing text and then walk the chain and generate text from the analysis.

To analyze a corpus of text files, thus:

carkov analyze mychain.chain textfile1.txt textfile2.txt ... textfileN.txt

To walk a chain and generate text form it, thus:

carkov chain mychain.chain -c 10

There are two analysis modes currently supported, english and word, which are passed to the analyze method with the -m argument. english mode analyzes the input in a word-wise method: the input is segmented into (English-style) sentences, each of which are analyzed as separate chains of words. word segments the input into tokens, each of which is analyzed as a series of characters separately.

Analysis also allows a window size to be specified, so that each item in the chain may be a fixed series of items of a specific length (for example, the word foo with a window of 2, would analyze to (_, ) -> 'f', (, f) -> o, (f, o) -> o, etc). The wider the window, the more similar or identical to the input stream the output becomes since there are fewer total options to follow any given token. This is specified with the analysis command line with the -w argument.

About Library

The library itself exposes objects and interfaces to do the same as the command line above. A todo item on this project is to generate documentation and examples, but looking at the contents of main.py should be instructive. The library is written in such a way as to be pretty agnostic about the items that are chained, and hypothetically any sequential set of things could work for this. Some framework would have to be written to support displaying these sorts of things but it should be possible if non-textual data were desired.

The library also provides a few mechanisms for serializing a ready to use chain for reuse in other projects. The command line makes use of the binary serialization mechanism (which uses msgpack) to save chains from the analysis step for re-use in the chain step. There is also a mechanism which produces a python source file tthat can be embedded in a target project so that a python project can use the chain without having to include an extra data file. It should be noted that this of course is extremely inefficient for large chains.