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'. The parser simply looks through each book and pulls out the various descriptions of nouns. 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.

Eventually I realised that there's a much better way of doing this: parse books! 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.

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).

What are describing words