Making a Chrissy Teigen Bot (Summer Project 1)

In addition to organizing the March for Science Student Summit (shameless plug - more information here), I am trying my hand at a new machine learning project! I’ve never worked with natural language processing before, and wanted to learn about data mining, so I decided to make a program that creates tweets based on training data from a particular user.

Initially, I wanted to use myself, but I needed a large enough dataset to even have a shot at generative realistic tweets. I also needed a user that was not likely to become… problematic (a la Microsoft’s super racist twitter bot). After a thorough search (read: I opened Twitter and scrolled twice), I found the perfect person - Chrissy Teigen!

So far, I’ve downloaded the tweets using the Tweepy API and done some light pre-processing to remove unncesessary metadata. I’m planning to pick a model over the next couple days, and will update this post as things happen!

You can follow my progress on GitHub here: https://github.com/harrodjordan/ItsChrissy

Done

• Learned to use Tweepy

• Downloaded roughly 3000 tweets

Discussion, links, and tweets

I'm a graduate student at Harvard-MIT HST. Follow me on Twitter; to see what I'm up to today, and tweet at me if you want to chat!

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