I have run a first set of experiments, according to the simple approach described in the first post. In particular:
These are the top 20 results for the three systems.
There clearly is a lot of redundancy and most results convert various A suffixes into B:-edy. The reason for this is quite obvious.
It is possibly less obvious that
or -> edy.
appears to be more effective than
or. -> edy.
The difference between the two is that the first one can break an A word e.g.
dorchaiin -> dedy.chaiin
where (in this case) both resulting words appear in B. The second rule only applies to the subset of the scope where -or is word final.
Another substitution I did not expect is:
y.d -> dy.
this results in rewrites like:
shey.dair -> shedy.air
chy.dam -> chdy.am
which indeed transform A-word-sequences into valid B-words.
There could be other substitutions worth commenting upon, but my main interest now is understanding how to proceed. A possibility could be re-formulating this search into something like "simulated annealing", rather than this simple brute-force approach. Also, a distance measure that considers the overlap between word-sequences (instead of word frequencies alone) is something I am curious about.
- I matched A (HerbalA+Pharma) vs B (HerbalB+Stars+Bio), ignoring the intermediate sections Astro / Cosmo / Zodiac (as suggested by Nick You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.);
- I used three different transliteration systems: EVA, Cuva, Currier. The basis for all being the Zandbergen-Landini Eva file, ignoring uncertain spaces;
- I searched for rewrite rules making A closer to B;
- as a difference measure, I considered the difference between word histograms (absolute value of the % frequency difference between each word type); this measure falls in the 0-1 range; the distance between the two unmodified sets is about 0.68, for all transliterations;
- each set A,B was treated as a single string, with '.' representing a space between words and '|' a line-break;
- for each set A,B the 100 most frequent character sequences of length 1-4 were considered; for each combination, the variation in distance was measured and the highest negative differences were selected.
These are the top 20 results for the three systems.
There clearly is a lot of redundancy and most results convert various A suffixes into B:-edy. The reason for this is quite obvious.
It is possibly less obvious that
or -> edy.
appears to be more effective than
or. -> edy.
The difference between the two is that the first one can break an A word e.g.
dorchaiin -> dedy.chaiin
where (in this case) both resulting words appear in B. The second rule only applies to the subset of the scope where -or is word final.
Another substitution I did not expect is:
y.d -> dy.
this results in rewrites like:
shey.dair -> shedy.air
chy.dam -> chdy.am
which indeed transform A-word-sequences into valid B-words.
There could be other substitutions worth commenting upon, but my main interest now is understanding how to proceed. A possibility could be re-formulating this search into something like "simulated annealing", rather than this simple brute-force approach. Also, a distance measure that considers the overlap between word-sequences (instead of word frequencies alone) is something I am curious about.


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