Neural Networks for Learning Lyrics

I created a Twitter account which was inspired by a couple Twitter accounts that applied a particular type of machine learning technique to learn how two (at the time) presidential hopefuls spoke. I thought, why not see what a model like this could do with lyrics from my favorite rock n roll artist?

Long short term memory (LSTM) is a recurrent neural network (RNN) that can be used to produce sentences or phrases by learning from text. The two twitter accounts that inspired this were ‘@deeplearnthebern’ and ‘@deepdrumpf’ which use this technique to produce phrases and sentences.

I scraped a little more than 300 of his songs and have fed them to a LSTM model using R and the mxnet library. Primarily I used the mxnet.io/ to build and train the model…great site and tools.  The tutorials on their site are very helpful and particularly this one.

The repository is here that contains the code for the scraper and other information.

Follow deeplearnbruce for tweets that are hopefully entertaining for Springsteen fans or anyone else. 

What Twitter Says About A&E and Duck Dynasty

I was looking on twitter and noticed a lot of people talking about Duck Dynasty and then talking about the consequences to A&E.  I was curious on what was being said.  I mined Twitter for #A&E and #duckdynasty and got the following wordclouds:

#A&E

#duckdynasty amp is ampersand

These were for words mentioned at least 20 times over a few thousand tweets.  Clearly, people have more variety to say about A&E for their move in regards to Phil Robertson.  Whereas people hashtagging Duck Dynasty itsefl are just memorializing/supporting Phil.  One hashtag is an A&E bash whereas the other seems like a support network.  The two hashtags are definitely connected, but are communicating two different things it seems across the twittersphere and are being used by maybe the same people but two different emotions.  No sentiment analysis here...maybe at a later date.