RNN Name Generator (learning project)

Deep Learning
1

Hi all !

As I am trying to undestand RNN and LSTM I started a small project to create a model that will learn to generate names or first names based on a given corpus (tested on Lord of the Ring character list and real first names):

Being quite happy with the results I would like to share it here to get some reviews. Every comment is welcome (coding style, clarity, project structure, ML approach, etc.) !

The project is a Jupyter Notebook based on Tensorflow/Keras.

As a wrap up:

  • I feel that the task to learn is quite easy (compared to text generation based on books like here.
  • The main difficulty was to generate short fix-sized input sequences. I add some padding characters according to the choosen sequence size to do that easily and to generate names without seeds. But Iā€™m not sure it is the right way to do it.
  • Very small RNN (single layer, down to 16 hiddent units) are ables to do quite well.
  • LSTM cells are probably overkill for that.
  • But it allows me to keep a ā€˜largeā€™ character dictionnary (didnā€™t convert upper case or weird diacritic) and generate fun LOTR names.

What do you think of this project and what could have been done differently ?

1 Like
3

I think this is a really cool project! :sunglasses:

What I would have done differently: show more results! I want to see tons of generated names of elves, dwarves, hobbits!

Another point is that I donā€™t follow why you do the padding. Check for instance Andrey Karpathyā€™s seminal blog post where no padding of any kind is needed.

1 Like
4

Thanks for your kind word !

Youā€™re right it miss some fun results:
Hobbits (64 hidden units, 400 epochs)
Isembran Took, Gordbea Grund, Mayrangl, Myrtle BurarwBlolc (wrong upper case :frowning: )

Elfs (256 hidden units, 350 epochs)
AedneĆ­, ThanaĆ«a, Enros, Gilignor, Arnedei, Elwn, Calanor, Amros, Aradwen, Fanath, ā€¦

Mens (64 hidden units, 30 epochs)
Agriel, Tar-Meneldil, Tarduin, Cemendi, Tarciryas, Elptar, Hirost, ā€¦

Real first names (64 hidden units, 100 epochs)
Irvia, Amadrie, Anjell, Kathenzita, Alberte, Kamely, Triny, Iacki, Sasham, Molette, Timory, Herrika, Tarletta, Mikas, ā€¦

I will check on Andrey work because I didnā€™t read it extensively before and I just saw he did it for baby names too. Thx !

1 Like
5

Those look pretty good!

What do you think about a ā€œblind testā€: You give us ~10 names from each category, all mixed up, and we have to guess the category for each name (Hobbit/Elf/Man/Real)?