Using NLP to Write Graduation Speeches

2018-07-23

I've always been a little bit obsessed with graduation speeches. Put simply, I like being reminded of the great possibility and great responsibility of living.

But as it's going to be a while until May rolls around again, I decided to try my hand at generating my own graduation speeches using some basic data science techniques.

I'm happy to report that after a little bit of NLP using Markov chains (and a whole lot of data-scraping and data-cleaning), I was able to bring forth to the world this inspiring sentence:

They listened to someone who makes nothing but flaming hot Cheetos.

If you're interested in reading more about the specifics of my project, I wrote about it in detail on the FloydHub blog, or you can try it out now:

Click this button to open a Workspace on FloydHub where you can generate your own "commencement speech style" sentences in a live JupyterLab environment that we call a Workspace.

The commencement address dataset of ~300 famous speeches (that I painstakingly assembled) will be automatically attached and available in the Workspace.

The speech_maker notebook has three sections for you to try, where you'll generate commencement-speech sentences:

1. Using the entire dataset
2. Filtering to only the top ten schools by count of speeches given
3. Filtering to one school at a time using a Jupyter widget extension

Where can I read actual good speeches?

Right here. I put together this simple Gatsby.js static site with the raw text (and some YouTube links) of the speeches in my dataset. PRs are open for the dataset if anyone's interested in contributing. Right now, the best we have is the NPR "Best of" commencement speech website, which hasn't been updated since 2015. It would be great to find a way to make a new home for great speeches on the web.