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  • From: "JAMES CHRISTIAN READ" <JCR128 AT student.anglia.ac.uk>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] Karl's lexicon
  • Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2007 15:43:22 +0100

Hi Karl,

KWR: I can understand where there are alternate spellings, I would have to
have an entry for each of the alternate spellings. But what about
where a spelling can come from two or more sources? For example, Y$B
would have to pull up three entries, Y$B, $BH and $WB because Y$B is
found as a derivative from all three roots. It's the context that
tells which root is the one to use. Moreover, it could be a 3rd p. s.
qal imp. or a participle or a ... depending on which root and part of
speech it has in the sentence. There are many such examples. How would
your database deal with those?

JCR: I think that this is an excellent example of where the value of having
definitions for n-grams and not
just single words comes in. By using n-grams and not
just what we conventionally have decided to treat as a
single word (real speech shows no pauses in the
sequence of sound waves for natural n-grams) you have
the opportunity to use context as a guide in your
unique entries.

If you don't want to go down this path the only solution would be to have
multiple entries for the
word so that it can be associated with multiple roots.
The first query would return all the roots. The second
query would return the three roots with their entries.

For maximum user friendliness the user would have the
option to select the single word (with its possible
multiple entries) or the natural n-gram in which it
sits (with a potentially much less ambiguous entry).

Again, I cannot stress strongly enough that if you
were to have definitions for each and every single
word the logic of such an application would be greatly
simplified. In the scenario of words that have multiple
possible derivations the word could have as its entry
whatever you feel like. You could put a comma separated
list of possible meanings and derivations all in the
one field. What this means in plain English is that
everything could be held in the one table with no need
for multiple queries or multiple tables, i.e. faster,
cleaner and more user friendly.

James Christian Read - BSc Computer Science
http://www.lamie.org/hebrew - thesis1: concept driven machine
translation using the Aleppo codex
http://www.lamie.org/lad-sim.doc - thesis2: language acquisition simulation
http://www.lamie.org/ngelta





































































































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