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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

#81

Post by 3036e4 »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #80
3036e4 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not only a way to make more money, but it also matches better to modern development approaches. Major versions come from a time where one had to produce physical media. Thus one could do a major release only every few years. Back then features had to be grouped together in a big bang release. Nowadays one can ship features as they are being developed, with many small features changes all the time.

That was probably true a long time ago, but I bought software using that model that did not have any physical releases and at least one had frequent minor releases adding new features.

It seems to me like the "subscription model" is exactly the same, except for the use of DRM and cloud dependencies to force users to pay for new versions. The only thing that changed was that the option to remain on an old version was taken away from users.

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

#82

Post by wizzwizz4 »

dmurray wrote: post #49
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see no reason that an LLM should be better at guessing than a trie (unless the actual example was in its training data, in which case a web search would be more appropriate).

I agree. I just like having the guessing done at compile time on principle. It allows you to change a guess, if you find that it's wrong, and convince yourself that you haven't broken any of the other cases where you were previously accidentally right.

My main objection is the temptation to mix real and fabricated data. Your entire dataset becomes much less useful if it's got nonsense mixed in with it, and if historical examples are anything to go by, it can be hundreds of years before someone identifies and untangles the nonsense from the fact. Any minor benefit is not worth this risk imo.

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

#83

Post by yujzgzc »

tomsmeding wrote: post #53
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…

By the author's own evaluation the solution proposed is not always correct either. The real danger would be the LLM hallucinating a different name altogether.

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

#84

Post by 1-more »

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 had an idea for a flash card generator for Russian that would do preposition + adjective + noun to get faster at declining in my head; I had done Latin before that and no one expects you to do Latin declension quickly (unless you're a monk maybe?). Never went anywhere with it, naturally.

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

#85

Post by jedimastert »

adammarples wrote: post #77
jedimastert wrote: post #2

It's like an interview question from hell. Reversing a trie is those things that I might ever use once in my life, but that one time I will look like an absolute wizard.

I don't think they reversed the trie, they just reversed the names before putting them in?

That's what I meant yes.

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

#86

Post by BenjiWiebe »

charcircuit wrote: post #65
BenjiWiebe wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean you'd be in favor of subscriptions for owning a vehicle, rather than paying outright? Or a house? The manufacturer/builder gets paid once, and you get value monthly.

Leasing cars and renting houses is already a common practice. So yes I believe these make sense to exist. The existence of purchasing cars and houses with no ongoing cost to the builder is due to competition.

Also leasing cars isn't usually (ever?) from the manufacturer of the car.

Houses, not sure how it's done in more populous areas, but around here you don't ever rent from the builder. You rent from someone who bought the house from a builder (or bought from someone who did, etc etc).

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