Where to get a set of common English phrase patterns?

Question

I hope that this computational linguistics question is not an off-topic here.

For my little just-for-fun programming project I'm looking for common English phrase part-of-speech patterns to use to generate pseudo-natural-language phrases.

But, unfortunately, I'm lost in the terminology, and can't figure out the proper keywords to google up what I'm looking for.

What I look for is a set of patterns like this one:

<Noun> <verb> <adjective> <verb>.

...or this one (which does contain some actual words instead of placeholders):

<Adverb>, the <adverb> <adjective>, <adverb> <adjective> <noun> 
and the <adverb> <adjective>, <adverb> <adjective> <noun>
<verb> <adverb> over the <adverb> <adjective> <noun>.

So, any clues?

Answer 1

I think you are looking for sentence patterns or grammar patterns. Here is a page with a random sentence generator that can use several patterns: http://www.manythings.org/rs/

Here are a few more pages with some more information about sentence patterns:

• https://arts-ccr-002.bham.ac.uk/ccr/patgram/
• http://www.yourdictionary.com/grammar-rules/Grammar-Patterns-for-Sentences.html
• http://www.towson.edu/ows/sentpatt.htm

Answer 2

Not sure I know what the terms you are looking for are, but you might find out by going through the tutorials and free book courtesy of nltk.org.

You'd have to learn a least a bit of python, but it'll definitely do as a quick introduction to computational linguistics.