Adjectives to word conversation

I had a little conversation with the Eminent and Aged Free Lover who acted as my guide, and I give it in the manner of the «interviewing reporter.

That night, long after the rest of the house were asleep, the Triple Alliance lay awake engaged in earnest conversation; and in the morning, as the boys were assembling for breakfast, Diggory touched Acton on the shoulder and whispered, «I say, we‘ve thought of a plan to find out if any one goes into the shed at night.

After a quarter of an hour of this pleasant conversation, for such all three seemed to find it, Mr. Saffron finished his wine, handed the glass to Beaumaroy, and took a cordial leave of Alec Naylor.

Rolfe would have described it officially as familiar conversation, but that description would have overlooked the deference, the sense of inferiority, in «Kincher‘s« manner.

I woke to ask if the suggestion which had come to me in our brief conversation about the bottles taken from the wine—vault, was the promising one it had then appeared, or only a fool‘s trick bound to end in disaster.

«On the preceding evening,« says professor Maas, «I was visited by a friend with whom I had a lively conversation, upon Joseph IInd‘s suppression of monasteries and convents.

For truly the entire magnificence of that consisted in corrupt things, in gold and silver, in carved stone, and in a variety of woods; but the whole beauty of this resteth in the adornment of an agreeable conversation, in the godly devotion of its inmates, and their beautifully ordered mode of life.

He and Sharpe Grover visited a village of Indians, supposed to be peaceably inclined, near Big Spring Station, in Western Kansas; and after spending several hours with the redskins in friendly conversation, they prepared to depart, having declined an invitation to pass the night there.

«I do so enjoy brilliant conversation.

«It is very curious,« said Rudolph, trying polite conversation, «how they paint so the eyes on their jonks.

For three years Mr. and Mrs. Judson devoted themselves solely to the study of Burman, and did not even attempt any directly evangelistic work, beyond the opportunity afforded by casual conversation with a few individuals.

Beside the early morning rides to which reference has been made, which afforded opportunities for religious conversation, Miss Whately would occasionally stay for a week or two at some farmhouse or by the seaside, and find opportunities of teaching the people around something of the Gospel.

All this has long passed into the domain of history, and has been told so many times by so many different people that I will not go into details except to say that the French protectorate of Tunis (now one of our most flourishing colonies) was entirely arranged by W. in a long confidential conversation with Lord Salisbury.

«I really think some of your instructive conversation would benefit us more greatly.

Then I had the idea of carrying on some imaginary conversation with you, which would induce the man who was listening to go away.

«I have set a guard to my mouth, when the sinner stood against me« (Psalm 38, 2); and it is well to guard against too frequent or too long conversations, which fill the soul with thoughts disturbing to a prayerful disposition.

«Not after that long ride an‘ cheerful conversation!« With the prospect of supper, and a hot supper, so close at hand, the girls could laugh at the gloomy stories of the old driver.

The experience acquired by adapting myself to the peculiarities of Mohammedans, and by daily conversation with them for about twenty years, has impressed me with the firm conviction that between Islâm and the modern world an understanding is to be attained, and that no period has offered a better chance of furthering it than the time in which we are living.

She craved sympathy and intellectual conversation and knowledge.

« The subsequent conversation between the matron and the young girl seemed to put the mistress of the house in excellent humor, and when the carriage drove off she kissed all the ladies quite as rapturously as if she had never vowed undying hatred and vengeance upon the Yankee people.

Now, my idea of perfect happiness for a house is to have two wounded warriors like Vincent and me, tractable, amiable, always ready to join in rational conversation and make love if necessary, providing we‘re encouraged.

Burman aspired to further improvements, and, not satisfied with the opportunities of literary conversation which Utrecht afforded, travelled into Switzerland and Germany, where he gained an increase both of fame and learning.

After the accession of Queen Mary to the throne, he was equally valued by her, and was admitted into the most intimate conversation with her, in diverting her by his merry stories, which he did, even when she lay languishing on her death—bed.

«Yes,« the widow smiled, recalling their conversation relative to Parker‘s abrupt proposal of marriage.

She therefore heard considerable conversation about the plays, and about the persons acting the chief rôles in them.

The idea for the Describing Words engine came when I was building the engine for Related Words (it’s like a thesaurus, but gives you a much broader set of related words, rather than just synonyms). While playing around with word vectors and the «HasProperty» API of conceptnet, I had a bit of fun trying to get the adjectives which commonly describe a word. Eventually I realised that there’s a much better way of doing this: parse books!

Project Gutenberg was the initial corpus, but the parser got greedier and greedier and I ended up feeding it somewhere around 100 gigabytes of text files — mostly fiction, including many contemporary works. The parser simply looks through each book and pulls out the various descriptions of nouns.

Hopefully it’s more than just a novelty and some people will actually find it useful for their writing and brainstorming, but one neat little thing to try is to compare two nouns which are similar, but different in some significant way — for example, gender is interesting: «woman» versus «man» and «boy» versus «girl». On an inital quick analysis it seems that authors of fiction are at least 4x more likely to describe women (as opposed to men) with beauty-related terms (regarding their weight, features and general attractiveness). In fact, «beautiful» is possibly the most widely used adjective for women in all of the world’s literature, which is quite in line with the general unidimensional representation of women in many other media forms. If anyone wants to do further research into this, let me know and I can give you a lot more data (for example, there are about 25000 different entries for «woman» — too many to show here).

The blueness of the results represents their relative frequency. You can hover over an item for a second and the frequency score should pop up. The «uniqueness» sorting is default, and thanks to my Complicated Algorithm™, it orders them by the adjectives’ uniqueness to that particular noun relative to other nouns (it’s actually pretty simple). As you’d expect, you can click the «Sort By Usage Frequency» button to adjectives by their usage frequency for that noun.

Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source mongodb which was used in this project.

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