TL;DR

Expanding nouns and adjectives in Nuovo vocabolario di base.

After expanding verbs, it’s just right to turn towards other words that can be inflected (is this a verb?) in Italian: nouns (some, at least) and adjectives.

As a rule of thumb, common nouns of stuff that can appear in female or male forms have different inflections, as well as singular and plural. This can bring a whopping 2 additional bits of entropy to the lot, which is not bad.

I could not find some ready-made soup like ian-hamlin/verb-data though. That came anyway to the rescue, because it contains a pointer to the source of its data: the Wiktionary.

How I managed to get the data from there will be hopefully elaborated in some other post. Here, it suffices to say that I saved a file with lines like this (gatto is the singular male form of cat):

gatto;type=sost;gender=m;pf=gatte;pm=gatti;sf=gatta;sm=gatto

This line includes all available inflected forms for singular, plural, female and male. With this at hand, we can build a similar expansion like for verbs:

sub load_spmf_expansions ($set_for, $filename) {
   for my $line (path($filename)->lines_utf8) {
      $line =~ s{\A\s+|\s+\z}{}gmxs;

      my ($main, @pairs) = split m{;}mxs, $line;

      my %kv = map {
         my ($key, @values) = map { lc }
           grep { length $_ && $_ =~ m{[a-z]}imxs }
           map { s{\A\s+|\s+\z}{}rgmxs } split m{[=,]}mxs, $_;
         $key => \@values;
      } grep { /=/ } @pairs;

      my @additional;
      for my $key (qw< pf sf pm sm >) {
         my $values = $kv{$key} or next;
         push @additional, $values->@*;
      }

      my @matches = grep { exists $set_for->{$_} } ($main, @additional)
        or next;

      # duplicates are OK
      add_related($set_for, @matches, $main, @additional);
   } ## end for my $line (path($filename...))
   return $set_for;
} ## end sub load_spmf_expansions

This time we’re doing the expansion in reverse order: we read each candidate expansion and then match each possible alternative against the available words (which come from the verbs expansion).

Here we start to get a glimpe about why we’re using a hash for tracking words: it’s easy to look for them in these cases. Additionally, it allows us to “associate” some verb forms with candidate nouns (many present and past participles are used as such). Why I want to keep them “related” will be cleared in some future post.

If we have any match, then the expansions can be added. I’m not 100% sure it’s the best thing to do, but it seems a good first-pass approximation so far.

Stay safe!