Success!!

Ha! Finally finished the project. It ended up not being nearly as terrible as I thought. As I suspected working with poems over images was much more manageable. That's not to say I didn't have my own issues...

First of all, loading the seven documents into a single folder ended up being a trial in itself. I was able to upload the documents to my computer fine, but when I attempted to open them in the Racket program they were nowhere to be found. Perhaps Racket couldn't read them properly? I again downloaded the files but them tried to open them in the program. Still unable to save them in Dr. Racket together. A friendly t.a. in the computer science help center fixed that in one minute.

I opened up the dictionary and took a peak. I'm also studying linguistics at the moment so it was interesting to peak at the vowel translations and try and figure out the pattern it was using.

ABSTENTION  AH0 B S T EH1 N CH AH0 N
FINGERTIPS  F IH1 NG G ER0 T IH2 P S
PHEDRA  F EH1 D R AH0

So the vowels seem to be classified more generally (AH, EH) rather than with each phoneme representing a symbol like in the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). The following numbers probably operate as a specifier on the initial vowel encoding. For example, in fingertips, the initial IH has a 1 and the latter, a 2. Perhaps that has to do with the vowel features, where the first IH is nasalized due to its relation to the following NG? While the second IH is a more regular sounding /I/ and then encoded with a 2. What then would a 0 mean? In abstention, AH is used for both a /AE/sound and also later, a /U/ sound...doesn't seem consistent.

Moving on, there was some debate within my group regarding the first function, lookup-entry. This functions contract was to decide if a given word was in the dictionary, then extract it and the other information on that line. My first assumption was to use the function member? to implement this, but this would then give us a Boolean...which is not that helpful. I fooled around with member? until my partner had a better idea, which I don't think I'm supposed to write about here.

Next, I also spent a lot of time on the vowel? function. I initially wanted to define this function by coding it to look for any entries with 2-3 units. But looking at the dictionary data I saw that several consonants were similarly encoded with 2 units (CH, NG) so that wouldn't work. Luckily my group had a way to circumvent this problem by analyzing phoneme entries based on another feature.

Overall this project was a lot less painful than the first one. Now its time to start studying for the final! Will update soon with more questions, maybe even a nice study plan