Their purpose is often satirical, intending to show that there is little difference between the generated text and real examples.
Many work by using techniques such as Markov chains to reprocess real text examples; alternatively, they may be hand-coded.
Generated texts can vary from essay length to paragraphs and tweets.
(The term "quote generator" can also be used for software that randomly selects real quotations.)
Further to its esoteric interest, a discussion of parody generation as a useful technique for measuring the success of grammatical inferencing systems is included, along with suggestions for its practical application in areas of language modeling and text compression.