Comment by ggggtez
6 years ago
A think the right way to test such a tool is to start with a list of known portmanteaus or rhymes, and check if the tool successfully finds them, and with what precision and recall.
Just having people plug in words and find things that they find interesting is going to result in people feeling it's better than it actually is. I tried a few examples, and while some of the outputs seemed "OK", they missed what seemed like obvious puns that I know exist in the lexicon because I was able to massage the inputs until it found them.
I think the first step would be to use a tool for word selection that does a better job finding actual synonyms instead of "words that are vaguely the same".
The phoneme matching aspect of it obviously works very well. I think if you had more control over the words it would use, you'd get better results. See my comment about "politician" above. I've repeated tried combinations with the word politician in them, and none of the synonyms I would expect to show up ever showed up.