­Rhyme it: Online robot creates poetry out of Twitter posts

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Published time: January 14, 2013 16:07
Edited time: January 14, 2013 20:11

A Twitter bot turning random public posts into poetry has become the latest darling of Twitter. Pentametron is represented by Shakespeare’s face framed in a Twitter egg, and rhymes random users’ posts into poetic couplets.

Knowingly or not many users write their posts on Twitter in iambic pentameter. Pentametron, the online robot created by enthusiast Ranjit Bhatnagar seeks out such tweets and then re-tweets them in rhyming couplets.

The rhymed tweets appear on Pentametron’s public Twitter account and on the robot’s website. Users whose public messages, fitting into the ten-syllable alternating-stress meter commonly used by Shakespeare, may never even know their posts have become part of an amusing online poetry project.

The robot uses only plain text, first of all getting rid of emoticons and smiles, the Gawker reported earlier this year. Then the robot checks the pronunciation of each word in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary to determine whether the post is in iambic pentameter and then combines the posts into couplets and even 14-lined sonnets.

The creator of the robot Ranjit Bhatnagar says he’s always been keen to find ways to make his life brighter. "I always find some new funny or accidentally profound thing there to enjoy," he told Gawker.

"It's fascinating to me that … one of the most popular sites just moves words around… One of the goals of Pentametron is to show how weird and interesting this giant flood of language is," he added.

Screenshot from pentametron.com