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Hellisotherpeople
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Lipogram-e

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GADSBY

I


If Youth, throughout all history, had had a champion to stand up for
it; to show a doubting world that a child can think; and, possibly,
do it practically; you wouldn't constantly run across folks today
who claim that "a child don't know anything." A child's brain starts
functioning at birth; and has, amongst its many infant convolutions,
thousands of dormant atoms, into which God has put a mystic possibility
for noticing an adult's act, and figuring out its purport.

Up to about its primary school days a child thinks, naturally, only of
play. But many a form of play contains disciplinary factors. "You can't
do this," or "that puts you out," shows a child that it must think,
practically, or fail. Now, if, throughout childhood, a brain has no
opposition, it is plain that it will attain a position of "status quo,"
as with our ordinary animals. Man knows not why a cow, dog or lion was
not born with a brain on a par with ours; why such animals cannot add,
subtract, or obtain from books and schooling, that paramount position
which Man holds today.

But a human brain is not in that class. Constantly throbbing and
pulsating, it rapidly forms opinions; attaining an ability of its own;
a fact which is startlingly shown by an occasional child "prodigy"
in music or school work. And as, with our dumb animals, a child's
inability convincingly to impart its thoughts to us, should not class
it as ignorant.

Upon this basis I am going to show you how a bunch of bright young
folks did find a champion; a man with boys and girls of his own; a man
of so dominating and happy individuality that Youth is drawn to him
as is a fly to a sugar bowl. It is a story about a small town. It is
not a gossipy yarn; nor is it a dry, monotonous account, full of such
customary "fill-ins" as "romantic moonlight casting murky shadows down
a long, winding country road." Nor will it say anything about tinklings
lulling distant folds; robins carolling at twilight, nor any "warm glow
of lamplight" from a cabin window. No. It is an account of up-and-doing
activity; a vivid portrayal of Youth as it is today; and a practical
discarding of that worn-out notion that "a child don't know anything."

Now, any author, from history's dawn, always had that most important
aid to writing:--an ability to call upon any word in his dictionary in
building up his story. That is, our strict laws as to word construction
did not block his path. But in _my_ story that mighty obstruction
_will_ constantly stand in my path; for many an important, common word
I cannot adopt, owing to its orthography.

I shall act as a sort of historian for this small town; associating
with its inhabitants, and striving to acquaint you with its youths,
in such a way that you can look, knowingly, upon any child, rich
or poor; forward or "backward;" your own, or John Smith's, in your
community. You will find many young minds aspiring to know how, and WHY
such a thing is so. And, if a child shows curiosity in that way, how
ridiculous it is for you to snap out:--

"Oh! Don't ask about things too old for you!"

Such a jolt to a young child's mind, craving instruction, is apt so
to dull its avidity, as to hold it back in its school work. Try to
look upon a child as a small, soft young body and a rapidly growing,
constantly inquiring brain. It must grow to maturity slowly. Forcing a
child through school by constant night study during hours in which it
should run and play, can bring on insomnia; handicapping both brain and
body.

Now this small town in our story had grown in just that way:--slowly;
in fact, much _too_ slowly to stand on a par with many a thousand
of its kind in this big, vigorous nation of ours. It was simply
stagnating; just as a small mountain brook, coming to a hollow, might
stop, and sink from sight, through not having a will to find a way
through that obstruction; or around it. You will run across such a
dormant town, occasionally; possibly so dormant that only outright
isolation by a fast-moving world, will show it its folly. If you will
tour Asia, Yucatan, or parts of Africa and Italy, you will find many
sad ruins of past kingdoms. Go to Indo-China and visit its gigantic
Ankhor Vat; call at Damascus, Baghdad and Samarkand. What sorrowful
lack of ambition many such a community shows in thus discarding such
high-class construction! And I say, again, that so will Youth grow
dormant, and hold this big, throbbing world back, if no champion backs
it up; thus providing it with an opportunity to show its ability for
looking forward, and improving unsatisfactory conditions.

So this small town of Branton Hills was lazily snoozing amidst
up-and-doing towns, as Youth's Champion, John Gadsby, took hold of it;
and shook its dawdling, flabby body until its inhabitants thought a
tornado had struck it. Call it tornado, volcano, military onslaught,
or what you will, this town found that it had a bunch of kids who had
wills that would admit of no snoozing; for that is Youth, on its
forward march of inquiry, thought and action.

If you stop to think of it, you will find that it is customary for
our "grown-up" brain to cast off many of its functions of its youth;
and to think only of what it calls "topics of maturity." Amongst such
discards, is many a form of happy play; many a muscular activity such
as walking, running, climbing; thus totally missing that alluring "joy
of living" of childhood. If you wish a vacation from financial affairs,
just go out and play with Youth. Play "blind-man's buff," "hop-scotch,"
"ring toss," and football. Go out to a charming woodland spot on a

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Dataset Card for Lipogram-e

Dataset Summary

This is a dataset of 3 English books which do not contain the letter "e" in them. This dataset includes all of "Gadsby" by Ernest Vincent Wright, all of "A Void" by Georges Perec, and almost all of "Eunoia" by Christian Bok (except for the single chapter that uses the letter "e" in it)

This dataset is contributed as part of a paper titled "Most Language Models can be Poets too: An AI Writing Assistant and Constrained Text Generation Studio" to appear at COLING 2022.

This dataset and the works within them are examples of Lipograms, which are works where a letter or string is systematically omitted. Lipograms are an example of hard-constrained writing.

Supported Tasks and Leaderboards

The main task for this dataset is Constrained Text Generation - but all types of language modeling are suitable.

Languages

English

Dataset Structure

Data Instances

Each is extracted directly from the available pdf or epub documents converted to txt using pandoc.

Data Fields

Text. The name of each work appears before the work starts and again at the end, so the books can be trivially split again if necessary.

Data Splits

None given. The way I do so in the paper is to extract the final 20% of each book, and concatenate these together. This may not be the most ideal way to do a train/test split, but I couldn't think of a better way. I did not believe randomly sampling was appropriate, but I could be wrong.

Dataset Creation

Curation Rationale

One way that we could extract text from datasets that doesn't use the letter "e" in it would be to simply computationally parse through large existing datasets for blocks or sentences which don't have the letter "e" in them. Unfortunately, this is extremely unlikely to lead to coherent or meaningful text. Doing so over increasingly large blocks or spans is likely to result in fewer and fewer examples. While the preparation of such a dataset would be fascinating in its own right - it is more interesting from the perspective of fine-tuning language models to have large scale prose narratives which fulfill the given constraint. This constraint of omitting the letter "e" is attractive because several book length works exist which do this.

Source Data

Initial Data Collection and Normalization

Project Gutenberg

Who are the source language producers?

Ernest Vincent Wright Georges Perec Christian Bok

Annotations

Annotation process

None

Who are the annotators?

n/a

Personal and Sensitive Information

None

Considerations for Using the Data

There may be conversion artifacts. I noticed 3 cases of the letter "e" being hallucinated from the pdf conversion of "a void" that I had to fix manually. They were reading special characters as the letter "e", and were not due to the authors making mistakes themselves. This implies that at least a few OCR errors exist.

Social Impact of Dataset

These books have existed for a awhile now, so it's unlikely that this will have dramatic Social Impact.

Discussion of Biases

This dataset is 100% biased against the letter "e". There may be biases present in contents of these works. It's recommended to read the books before using this in any non research application to verify that they are not problematic.

Other Known Limitations

It's possible that more works exist but were not well known enough for the authors to find them and include them. Finding such inclusions would be grounds for iteration of this dataset (e.g. a version 1.1 would be released). The goal of this project is to eventually encompass all book length english language "e" lipograms.