Title Authenticator

Links to the public repository:

https://github.com/Gak-Attack/HawkHack-Title-Authenticator

We decided to do this project as a clickbait checker. By checking if the title of any given project is related to it's actual material, users can tell if it's worth their time. However, we moved on to a more general purpose use when we realized it could be used to help not just judge existing titles, but also help come up with titles for current projects. 

The Title Authenticator takes in a title of the user's choice, and a preexisting text file the user has. It turns both into lists of strings for each word, removing all punctuation and splitting along the spaces. To keep count of each word's count, we made a class, wordCount, to store a string and count. The title words are then put into a list of wordCount. Lastly, each word in the title is compared to the words in the text file, and the count is incremented by one when a word matches.

The challenges we ran into were, for the most part, due to being first time hackathon participants. We did not have any preparations beforehand, and spent a good amount of time participating in the events instead of just coding. As a result, our work is not up to it's highest quality, and does not use any of the sponsor's software.

What we have learnt from this is to prepare more for the event, by spending a week or two refreshing ourselves and learning more about the software available, and brainstorming more ideas to make a plan further in advance. This project could have gone much further, had we given the planning more though. For example, we could have added other parts of the ranking process, such as length. 

We have accomplished something to be proud of. We successfully applied our learning from the past few years, taking from several different courses here at Laurier, to produce something. We tested our knowledge and ability, and made something. 

The next step would be adding onto the project to judge titles in other ways. Currently, the titles can be as long as the user wants, and will score better the more words are in it. Given a ranking based on both length and percentage would curb that. We could also add a ranking of perspective titles, so users can actively compare titles they wish to use. 

The attached file is what we used to test our code. It is an essay I wrote for Laurier's PP203: Social and Political Philosophy course.