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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

#51

Post by mikepurvis »

I’m surprised there’d be a benefit to doing this in the JS vs having your database just return all the cases with the name and then you select which one you need at display time — basically in the same layer that’s populating your localized language templates.

That said I’m curious how this manifests with cross-language situations. I guess the Icelandic UI displaying French names would just always use the nomitive case, and likewise for the English UI displaying Icelandic names? I assume this all mostly matters where the user is directly being addressed, or perhaps in an admin panel (“user x responded to user y”).

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

#53

Post by tomsmeding »

yujzgzc wrote: post #42

Valiant effort at old-school engineering applied to a niche problem. (Iceland has a population of only around 400,000 people!) As much as I love the geekery of this stuff though, isn't it already a better ROI to get an LLM to generate the strings you need? It has its own other problems (not claiming it'll be perfect) but for something so language related, it makes a lot of sense. Would also work for other languages t…

The article describes that a government body is using this library to generate indictments. In that situation, you do not want something that is mostly usually correct. Indeed, they asked the author for a strict version that does not try to guess the declension of unknown names based on their suffix, presumably so that they can just not decline them, which is better than picking the wrong declension 0.05% of the time.

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

#54

Post by jdcarr »

treetalker wrote: post #3

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…

I use ConjuGato on iOS for practicing Spanish conjugations. There’s a game mode where you’re given an infinitive/tense/person and think of the conjugation and you can filter it down to solely irregular verbs to learn the exceptions

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

#55

Post by 3036e4 »

perching_aix wrote: post #26
sneak wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software sold today does not require maintenance. Software to work in the future requires maintenance. I am not buying future software. I am buying today software. Increasingly I am not buying software at all.

This is a good argument in favor of subscriptions not being mandatory, but not in favor of the abolishment of subscriptions overall, which is what they were talking about.

That is the old way. You bought some application and it came with upgrades until next major version release or similar. Then when that release came out you could decide to pay again or just keep using the old (now unsupported) version you already paid for.

That solved all the issues with paying for maintenance, but sadly someone must have figured out a mandatory subscription was a better way to make more money.

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

#56

Post by ralferoo »

I mean, it's an interesting problem for Icelandic sites, but because he's explaining the basic concepts of how declensions work, it seems like he's aiming this at non-Icelandic developers. If they were to use this, no doubt it'll end up butchering names in some other language and lead to all manner of hard to track down bugs.

For example, if an English person called Arthur uses the site in Icelandic, I'm not sure they'd expect their name to be changed to presumably "Arth", "Arthi" or "Arthar" even if they were a keen learner of Icelandic. Their name is their name. So, as well as storing someone's name, you also have to ask them what language their name is, or guess and get it wrong. At that point, you might as well just ask them for all the different forms for the name as well, and then you don't have to worry about whether their name is on an approved list or not.

And if the website isn't localised into Icelandic, I've also got to wonder if Icelandic visitors would have an expectation of Icelandic grammar rules being applied to English (or whatever) text. Most Icelandic people I've spoken to before have an excellent command of English anyway, and I'm sure they'd understand why their name isn't changing form in English.

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

#57

Post by thaumasiotes »

perching_aix wrote: post #12
dmurray wrote: 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 natura…

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_laws_in_China#Ma_Cheng

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

#58

Post by ralferoo »

shagie wrote: post #40
alucardo wrote: post #11

Hmm, is this lib GDPR compliant?

There are a relatively finite number of Icelandic names. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Naming_Committee > A name not already on the official list of approved names must be submitted to the naming committee for approval. A new name is considered for its compatibility with Icelandic tradition and for the likelihood that it might cause the bearer embarrassment. Under Article 5 of the Personal Names Act, names…

That's not quite what qualifies it as PII.

> John may be your given name, but that data isn't personal data. One of the numbers 1969, 1978, 1987, 1996 might be your birth year... but https://oeis.org/A101039 isn't personal information either. Combining John with Smith and 1978 as the year of someone's birth... now you've got personal information that would be covered by the GDPR.

Just the facts "John" or "Smith" or "1978" aren't PII, but any single one attached to some other data is, because then that provides partial identification of that other data. So, for instance an attribution of a forum post to "John" is PII, even if there are thousands of other Johns using the system.

Actually, even that's not necessarily true. The mere fact that you are acknowledging a user exists with that name may make it PII. It's not a big deal to say our usernames include "John", "Mark", etc if there are literally thousands of them, but it's a big deal if one of the usernames is an incredibly rare name or spelling. In this case, the list presented in the article isn't PII, because the list is just a list of names downloaded from a government site that represent possible acceptable names. Just having that list provides no information about whether anyone with any of those names is using your service.

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

#59

Post by SonOfLilit »

My brain is screaming that there has to be a solution in Maybe generating a minimal list of regexes that classifies 100% of names correctly? Maybe a big enough bloom filter? Maybe like a bloom filter but instead of hashes we use engineered features?

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

#60

Post by mpascale00 »

sgarland wrote: post #34
mpascale00 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Given how profitable it is, I doubt it’ll be changed. That said, I very much like Codeweavers’ approach [0], which IMO is the modern equivalent to purchasing software on a physical medium: you buy it, you can re-download it as many times as you’d like, install it on as many machines as you’d like (single-user usage only), and you get 1 year of updates and support. After that, you can still keep using it indefinitely,…

Profitable for sure, but I'm often half surprised by the lack of competition against subscription-based everything these days.
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