Goodname is a tool to assist you with cool naming of your methods and software. Given a brief description of your method or software, this tool enumerates name candidates forming subsequences of the description (i.e., acronym).

For example, given description "Character-wise Double-array Dictionary" of your software, this tool will suggest some name candidates such as "crawdad" and "cheddar".

The Web App is the easiest way to try this tool. (This demo movie is at v0.1.1.)

goodname-cli provides a CLI tool of Goodname. The arguments are

• -w: Input word list (must be sorted, be unique, and include no upper-case letters).
• -k: Top-k to print (default=30).
• -l: The maximum number of arbitrary prefix letters to allow for generating recursive acronyms (default=0, must be in 0..=3).

Enter your description using only lowercase letters or a space basically. Set UPPERCASE only for letters that you want to be always included in a name candidate.

$ cargo run --release -p goodname-cli -- -w wordlist/words.txt -k 5
Enter your text:
Character wise Double array Dictionary
Matched 10 candidates
   1 crawdad: ChaRActer Wise Double Array Dictionary (score=2656)
   2 chided: CHaracter wIse DoublE array Dictionary (score=2064)
   3 cheddar: CHaracter wisE Double array DictionARy (score=1862)
   4 carded: ChARacter wise DoublE array Dictionary (score=1744)
   5 creeded: ChaRactEr wisE DoublE array Dictionary (score=1684)

In the above example, subsequence ('C', 'D', 'D') is always contained in the candidates. If you obtain too many or too few candidates, adjust the lettercase setting, as follows.

$ cargo run --release -p goodname-cli -- -w wordlist/words.txt -k 5
Enter your text:
Character wise double array dictionary
Matched 1047 candidates
   1 crawdad: ChaRActer Wise Double Array Dictionary (score=2656)
   2 chresard: CHaRactEr wiSe double ARray Dictionary (score=2244)
   3 chawdron: CHAracter Wise Double aRray dictiONary (score=2200)
   4 chadar: CHAracter wise Double ARray dictionary (score=2176)
   5 chawia: CHAracter WIse double Array dictionary (score=2176)

Or, you can specify the maximum number of arbitrary prefix letters to allow for generating recursive acronyms.

$ cargo run --release -p goodname-cli -- -w wordlist/words.txt -k 5 -l 2
Enter your text:
Character wise Double array Dictionary
Matched 25 candidates
   1 crawdad: ChaRActer Wise Double Array Dictionary (score=2656)
   2 chided: CHaracter wIse DoublE array Dictionary (score=2064)
   3 UNchided: CHaracter wIse DoublE array Dictionary (score=2064)
   4 Scheduled: CHaracter wisE DoUbLE array Dictionary (score=2032)
   5 cheddar: CHaracter wisE Double array DictionARy (score=1862)

The candidates are printed in score order. The scores are assigned based on the following ideas:

• The more forward letters of each word in a description, the higher the score.
• The more letters matched, the higher the score.

More formally, given a text $T$ and a set of positions ${ i_1, i_2, \dots, i_m }$ of $T$ such that $T[i_j]$ is not a space, we define the score of the subsequence $T[i_1] T[i_2] \dots T[i_m]$ as

$$ \sum_{j \in [1,m]} 2^{\ell_{\max} - d(i_j)}, $$

where $\ell_{\max}$ is the maximum length of a word obtained by separating $T$ with a space, and $d(i)$ is the distance from $T[i]$ to its preceding space (assuming $T[-1]$ is a space).

Enumerating all possible subsequences takes $O(2^n)$ time for an input text of length $n$. To perform this in practical time, we generate subsequences on a trie and early prune those that are not candidates. Furthermore, if the number of candidates exceeds 10k, the process will be forced to terminate.

• Devise more reasonable scoring.
• Prepare richer word dictionaries.

wordlist/words.txt is a list of English words provided by dwyl/english-words.