Datasets:

Hellisotherpeople
/

one_syllable

text stringlengths 0 72
I was born at York on the first of March in the sixth year of the reign
of King Charles the First. From the time when I was quite a young child,
I had felt a great wish to spend my life at sea, and as I grew, so did
this taste grow more and more strong; till at last I broke loose from
my school and home, and found my way on foot to Hull, where I soon got a
place on board a ship.

When we had set sail but a few days, a squall of wind came on, and on
the fifth night we sprang a leak. All hands were sent to the pumps, but
we felt the ship groan in all her planks, and her beams quake from stem
to stern; so that it was soon quite clear there was no hope for her, and
that all we could do was to save our lives.

The first thing was to fire off guns, to show that we were in need of
help, and at length a ship, which lay not far from us, sent a boat to
our aid. But the sea was too rough for it to lie near our ship's side,
so we threw out a rope, which the men in the boat caught, and made fast,
and by this means we all got in. Still in so wild a sea it was in vain
to try to get on board the ship which had sent out the men, or to use
our oars in the boat, and all we could do was to let it drive to shore.

In the space of half an hour our own ship struck on a rock and went
down, and we saw her no more. We made but slow way to the land, which we
caught sight of now and then when the boat rose to the top of some high
wave, and there we saw men who ran in crowds, to and fro, all bent on
one thing, and that was to save us.

At last to our great joy we got on shore, where we had the luck to meet
with friends who gave us the means to get back to Hull; and if I had now
had the good sense to go home, it would have been well for me.

The man whose ship had gone down said with a grave look, "Young lad, you
ought to go to sea no more, it is not the kind, of life for you." "Why
Sir, will you go to sea no more then?" "That is not the same kind of
thing; I was bred to the sea, but you were not, and came on board my
ship just to find out what a life at sea was like, and you may guess
what you will come to if you do not go back to your home. God will not
bless you, and it may be that you have brought all this woe on us."

I spoke not a word more to him; which way he went I knew not, nor did
I care to know, for I was hurt at this rude speech. Shall I go home
thought I, or shall I go to sea? Shame kept me from home, and I could
not make up my mind what course of life to take.

As it has been my fate through life to choose for the worst, so I did
now. I had gold in my purse, and good clothes on my back, and to sea I
went once more.

But I had worse luck this time than the last, for when we were far out
at sea, some Turks in a small ship came on our track in full chase. We
set as much sail as our yards would bear, so as to get clear from them.
But in spite of this, we saw our foes gain on us, and we felt sure that
they would come up with our ship in a few hours' time.

At last they caught us, but we brought our guns to bear on them, which
made them shear off for a time, yet they kept up a fire at us as long as
they were in range. The next time the Turks came up, some of their men
got on board our ship, and set to work to cut the sails, and do us all
kinds of harm. So, as ten of our men lay dead, and most of the rest had
wounds, we gave in.

The chief of the Turks took me as his prize to a port which was held by
the Moors. He did not use me so ill as at first I thought he would have
done, but he set me to work with the rest of his slaves. This was a
change in my life which I did not think had been in store for me. How my
heart sank with grief at the thought of those whom I had left at home,
nay, to whom I had not had the grace so much as to say "Good bye" when I
went to sea, nor to give a hint of what I meant to do!

Yet all that I went through at this time was but a taste of the toils
and cares which it has since been my lot to bear.

I thought at first that the Turk might take me with him when next he
went to sea, and so I should find some way to get free; but the hope
did not last long, for at such times he left me on shore to see to his
crops. This kind of life I led for two years, and as the Turk knew and
saw more of me, he made me more and more free. He went out in his boat
once or twice a week to catch a kind of flat fish, and now and then he
took me and a boy with him, for we were quick at this kind of sport, and
he grew quite fond of me.

One day the Turk sent me in the boat to catch some fish, with no one
else but a man and a boy. While we were out so thick a fog came on that
though we were out not half a mile from the shore, we quite lost sight
of it for twelve hours; and when the sun rose the next day, our boat was
at least ten miles out at sea. The wind blew fresh, and we were all much
in want of food, but at last, with the help of our oars and sail, we got
back safe to land.

When the Turk heard how we had lost our way, he said that the next time
he went out, he would take a boat that would hold all we could want if
we were kept out at sea. So he had quite a state room built in the long
boat of his ship, as well as a room for us slaves. One day he sent me
to trim the boat, as he had two friends who would go in it to fish with
him. But when the time came they did not go, so he sent me with the man
and the boy--whose name was Xury--to catch some fish for the guests that
were to sup with him.

Now the thought struck me all at once that this would be a good chance
to set off with the boat, and get free. So in the first place, I took

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Dataset Card for Lipogram-e

Dataset Summary

This is a dataset of English books which only write using one syllable at a time. At this time, the dataset only contains Robinson Crusoe — in Words of One Syllable by Lucy Aikin and Daniel Defoe

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 does not appear in the paper itself, but was gathered as a candidate constrained text generation dataset.

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

There are several books which claim to only be written using one syllable words. A list of them can be found here: https://diyhomeschooler.com/2017/01/25/classics-in-words-of-one-syllable-free-ebooks/

Unfortunately, after careful human inspection, it appears that only one of these works actually does reliably maintain the one syllable constraint through the whole text. Outside of proper names, I cannot spot or computationally find a single example of a more-than-one-syllable word in this whole work.

Source Data

Robinson Crusoe — in Words of One Syllable by Lucy Aikin and Daniel Defoe

Initial Data Collection and Normalization

Project Gutenberg

Who are the source language producers?

Lucy Aikin and Daniel Defoe

Annotations

Annotation process

None

Who are the annotators?

n/a

Personal and Sensitive Information

None

Considerations for Using the Data

There may be OCR conversion artifacts.

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

The only biases possible are related to the contents of Robinson Crusoe or the possibility of the authors changing Robinson Crusoe in some problematic way by using one-syllable words. This is unlikely, as this work was aimed at children.

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 works that do not use more than one syllable in each of their words (except for names)