Slant Rhyme Improvements

Recently I’ve done a few improvements to the slant rhyme dictionary.

Improvement #1 – Better Consonant Comparison

Consider:
rap vs rat – good
rap vs rant – bad

Previously these get the same score.

The difference between rat and rant is in the last consonant: t vs n_t. For rap vs rant, the existing scoring algorithm compares ‘p’ to ‘n’ and ‘p’ to ‘t’ and takes the higher score (‘p’ vs ‘t’), which is why they get the same score.

This isn’t how people make slant rhymes. You can’t drop the second last consonant and have it sound ok. What rappers really do is drop, or reduce the emphasis on the last consonant. Think rap vs strapped. You can either drop the final consonant ‘t’ from strapped, or kind of include it quietly after the rhyme’s been heard. Either way sounds good.

So I’ve changed the algorithm to allow dropping the one or more last consonants, but not consonants in the middle. This drops the score for rap vs rant.

Improvement #2 – Better Weights

I also changed the weights that determine the slant rhymes score.
eg
conclusive vs explosive
and
conclusive vs effusive

In the 2nd syllable, explosive has a better onset consonant, but effusive has a better vowel. So which is a better slant rhyme? I’d say conclusive effusive sounds better than conclusive explosive, so I upped the weight of vowels, and dropped the weight of onset consonants. Also, added a lot more weight to coda (ending) consonants on the last syllable.

Let me know if you don’t agree.

Improvement #3 – Added missing words and plurals

The dictionary is missing a lot of plurals. Before if you tried a plural and it wasn’t in the dictionary, it’d drop the ‘s’ and try again, which ok because ‘s’ is voiceless so it can dropped. But some nouns get an extra syllable (i_z) when you pluralize them, which is useful for rhyming.

eg verse -> verses. judge -> judges. surface -> surfaces

I added a number of these but then I got bored, so for sure there’s more. I also added some other words that were weirdly missing, like pasta. Wtf, how can it be missing pasta?!!

Now go, and immerse your self in subversive verses.