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Compressing Icelandic name declension patterns into a 3.27 kB trie

alexharri.com

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Re: Compressing Icelandic name declension patterns into a 3.27 kB trie

#12
post #10

For the 800 names that were missing declension data in the database, it seems like the most straightforward thing to do would be to assign their declensions by hand. It shouldn't take a native speaker more than a couple of hours (if some name they haven't seen before is ambiguous, then whatever they guess at least won't sound obviously wrong to other native speakers). Alternatively, very cheap to ask an LLM to do it.…

Yeah, that'd be a good idea. That said, it still wouldn't resolve the issue for names that are in-use despite not being approved (or foreign names).

I also live in a country with a centrally governed personal name list, but you can request exceptions, and there are people who were born before the list existed, so their names won't necessarily be on the list either. Immigrants can also retain their names during naturalization I believe, and there can be lots of other complications still. So the ability to sorta-kinda predict the proper declension is still useful.

Re: Compressing Icelandic name declension patterns into a 3.27 kB trie

#16

I remember that when I was first learning Spanish in high school, I found a piece of (Windows) software that pelted you with a series of pairs of an infinitive and a tense, and you had to conjugate the infinitive accordingly. (Spanish conjugation typically changes the end of the word; irregular verbs tend to involve stem changes). It was fantastic practice and really ingrained the rules; I became a whiz at it. When I…

You might be able to build something similar yourself using declension data extracted from Wiktionary using wiktextract: https://github.com/tatuylonen/wiktextract#pre-extracted-data

Re: Compressing Icelandic name declension patterns into a 3.27 kB trie

#17
post #5
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://memrussian.com/ ?

Grandfather talks about classical Windows software. On the Play Store this app says "Contains ads - In-app purchases". Ah, as a cheap bastard, I hate how software was pay once back then, and for this one I'm just going to ask you what's the monthly subscription price?

This comes up in so many threads here... How can we change the culture of subscriptions back to pay once???

Re: Compressing Icelandic name declension patterns into a 3.27 kB trie

#18

I remember that when I was first learning Spanish in high school, I found a piece of (Windows) software that pelted you with a series of pairs of an infinitive and a tense, and you had to conjugate the infinitive accordingly. (Spanish conjugation typically changes the end of the word; irregular verbs tend to involve stem changes). It was fantastic practice and really ingrained the rules; I became a whiz at it. When I…

When I was learning Spanish (on my own) 25 years ago I had a Spanish/English dictionary. It only translated verbs to Spanish infinitive, but each had a numerical index mapping it to a class of verbs with the same conjugation pattern.

There was a section at the front of the dictionary with full conjugation patterns over all tenses for one sample verb in each class.

Eg, each type of stem-changing verb fell into one index, full irregulars were singletons in their own class, some irregulars that behave similarly (iirc tener and detener) shared one class.

So all verbs in Spanish fell neatly into a few dozen unique patterns, and the indexing was already done.

I was going to build a quiz software just like you mentioned to conjugate any verb in any tense, but “never got around to it”.

I wonder how the reverse-string trie pattern in the article would be for reconstructing the class mapping.

Re: Compressing Icelandic name declension patterns into a 3.27 kB trie

#19

I remember that when I was first learning Spanish in high school, I found a piece of (Windows) software that pelted you with a series of pairs of an infinitive and a tense, and you had to conjugate the infinitive accordingly. (Spanish conjugation typically changes the end of the word; irregular verbs tend to involve stem changes). It was fantastic practice and really ingrained the rules; I became a whiz at it. When I…

> … learning Russian… explain the patterns… such an app

Non-native Russian speaker here. In the past, I cobbled together some scripts that use the spaCy Python module with the larger of the two Russian modules to provide context-aware lemmatization and grammatical tag extraction.

On the whole, though, my biggest gains in Russian were in letting go of the need to analytically deconstruct the inflections and instead build up a mental library of patterns (and exceptions) in my head through use.

EDIT: I mean context within a sentence, not a broader meaning.

Re: Compressing Icelandic name declension patterns into a 3.27 kB trie

#20
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grandfather talks about classical Windows software. On the Play Store this app says "Contains ads - In-app purchases". Ah, as a cheap bastard, I hate how software was pay once back then, and for this one I'm just going to ask you what's the monthly subscription price?

This comes up in so many threads here... How can we change the culture of subscriptions back to pay once???

It's not really about the culture anymore. Software that requires maintenance — and most does — has a continuous development cost. As such, subscription is the most natural way to cover it.

On the other hand, we have software which has low maintenance cost, but sold for peanuts ($0-$10) in small quantities, so authors try to introduce alternative revenue streams.

As in, it's fair to pay continuously (subscription) for continuous work (maintenance), so I don't expect that to go away. Ads, though, yuck...

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