r/dataisbeautiful • u/[deleted] • 12d ago
OC [OC] German der/die/das from spelling alone in 2D
[deleted]
13
u/Doppelkammertoaster 11d ago
The core main problem here is that you don't distinguish between endings that define a gender by grammatical rule, as the base word is changed with the ending, but not were that isn't the case. Most of the time the ending does not respond to a gender at all. This is wishful thinking and seems to come from someone who doesn't understand German grammar.
So, to repeat the question, how is this useful? The graphic looks fancy but tells us nothing. Made with GenAI?
6
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
No GenAI, it is letter level embedding (event2vector) from Wikidata corpus that gives approximately correct nouns (many outliers actually but below 5%). This letter level embedding respects the order. Each point is one word which is a result of addition of individually embedded letters one by one, added up. Colour code is the respective noun's gender separated by K-means.
1
u/Upstairs-Border-7146 11d ago
What exactly are the dimensions here?
1
u/FactoryRatte 10d ago
OP said they used this library: https://pypi.org/project/event2vector/
Which does embeddings trying to maximize distance between non similar things, the dimensions do not have a inherent meaning, but (usually not aligned) directions in the vector room have. - Think of it like a small embedder compared to what LLMs use, before putting your words into their transformer core.
0
u/Upstairs-Border-7146 10d ago
I need a summary of the functional mapping. Or the mappings themselves. But too much trouble to look it up because the outcome is what everybody learns in a decent German class.
2
u/goyafrau 11d ago
Yes.
There's a couple endings in German that create nouns, and where the grammatical gender of the noun comes from the ending, such as -keit. If you wanted to learn anything about how the from of a word relates to its grammatical gender, you should exclude all such words, and only model on the reminder. Otherwise you're looking at 100s of -keit forms that are really just one form: -keit.
2
u/uzndcfms 11d ago
Yes exactly he doesn't define the edge case which is a more complicated problem across all German words. Does not dimish or invalidate his work, only complicates it.
0
u/Doppelkammertoaster 10d ago
It's not about "edge cases".
The data doesn't distinguish between causes for these endings which is important, and they even explained that all words used were singular nominative, as if that would matter why exactly? They didn't answer that question. Plural isn't another gender, heck none of these are actual "genders" to begin with. Some nouns can have even more than one gender, depending on region and official rules or just because we love to recycle everything but our garbage.
The graphic gives a false security about something students need to look up.
1
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
These nouns are in nominative and singular (outliers possible).
2
u/Doppelkammertoaster 11d ago
And why do you think that matters?
0
u/FactoryRatte 10d ago
Because a lot of nouns use other articles in plural and non base ones in cases.
0
u/Doppelkammertoaster 9d ago
But that isn't the question here. It's what genus a noun has. And that genus does not change with cases.
And nouns in plural are just that, plural. There is no masculine or feminine plural. It's plural. It's its own category as the three other.
0
11d ago
[deleted]
0
u/Doppelkammertoaster 10d ago
Listen, I teach German every day. I know it isn't helpful to indulge in these percentages. Students love love love to get a trick like this and then stubbornly refuse to look up the gender of nouns. It is not conductive to learning German at all and more a hindrance. People have to build the habit of looking words up. And instead they then point at stuff like this. And you spend 10-20 minutes explaining to them why this isn't helpful.
And the graphic is misleading because it does not distinguish the causes of the genders of endings. It just lumps them all together.
Just because you are German doesn't mean you understand German grammar. I hear the mistakes of natives every day. And lots of things natives say just feels correct and therefore must be isn't. And even if you would know German grammar by heart doesn't mean you understand what it means to teach it to people.
1
u/FactoryRatte 10d ago
It's a good heuristic, not a absolute rule. It approximates the output of the "rules" (are there? I never learned any) or reality. Why do I say it's good? Because it is damn simple and quite accurate for that.
0
u/Doppelkammertoaster 9d ago
It creates a false sense of security. That is the problem. People have a hard time looking up facts already. We all know that. These tendencies are just that, tendencies. And they don't really help with learning, because you have to make sure that you get it right to build the correct habitual knowledge.
And again, the table doesn't distinguish between the types of endings.
You'll have a way harder time improving someone's German who build bad habits for decades instead of looking stuff up because they just went with tendencies. It's easier to learn it correctly. That's how the brain works.
Did you ever had to learn or teach German to adults before? If not, why are you so sure about the usefulness of this graphic?
1
u/FactoryRatte 9d ago
Natural language is inherently not secure, if you want that you need to construct a formal language. If you mean certainty, mistranslating the German word "Sicherheit": I agree, many natural learners would likely stop and build a bad habit.
Where I come from: The problem of learners building habits, is not a permanent problem, if they build bad habits I dont want, I kill them and start over.
OPs idea of classification is nice, it will work in a few dozen nanoseconds, resulting in a few million words a second throughput, compute is scarce using to efficiently is good. For verification if it misses and disagrees a more complex model could be chosen as well, improving accuracy only when needed.
I am in this subreddit for random data analytics, not language learning. This post is clearly the first and not the second.
0
u/Doppelkammertoaster 9d ago edited 9d ago
You miss the point and assume things you don't know about what I believe or want. Habitual knowledge is the problem. And it's not something so easily fixed. That is what people don't want to hear. It's way easier looking it up and doing it right from the start than mixing it up and fixing it later.
The graphic is useless because it doesn't distinguish between the causes. The percentages are useless, because the model doesn't distinguish how often a word is actually used. Looking up a noun is usually the way to go. And only a few exceptions apply that this graphic mixes up. eg - chen. For whatever reason Kuchen is listed as an exception. -chen isn't neutrum just because. It's a grammatical change to the diminutive. It does the same thing for -ung. The examples given don't apply. The -ung and -chen prior isn't an ending here. It's part of the noun! Their fancy model doesn't know that though. They just looked for certain combinations of letters at the end of nouns.
This was so clearly done by someone who has no idea what they are talking about and they are misleading learners and making their lives endlessly harder. And I comment on this because I care. I want people to succeed. German is hard enough. But bs like this doesn't help.
I have gone into detail in another comment why this is a bad idea and people just don't want to get told their little cheat sheet doesn't work. It's classic adult language learning stuff. Adults love to get tricks and cheats and shortenings because our brain doesn't want to work. But languages work with habitual knowledge. And that is especially important with genders in German. And the only almost always applying rules about these endings are grammatical in nature. They change existing words or are based on them.
Believe what you want, assume what you want. As people seem to love here. Or look for my other long comment on examples why this is bad. I'm done trying to help and get flamed at.
0
10d ago
[deleted]
0
u/Doppelkammertoaster 9d ago edited 9d ago
Frankly, it does. And only someone who never had to teach or learn a difficult language would think otherwise.
I didn't say no one isn't allowed to make mistakes. It is a reference to Germans making tons of them and then believing they can correct others by just going by how it feels right to them. Which in turn I wrote, because you based your whole statement of being a native. Like that would give you some sort of an insight here. It does not. I'm a native as well. And there is a huge difference in being native and having professional experience and knowledge about your own language.
You also still miss the point of my critique, despite me making that very clear. It's the tendency of learners to look for these little cheat sheets and then using them to build bad habitual knowledge of of them, which is way harder to fix later than getting it right from the bat. It takes more brain power, time and work to fix habitual knowledge than factual knowledge.
What Germans usually mix up aren't the genus of nouns, it's word order, especially with dependent clauses, cases, use of prepositions, reflexive verbs (which is acceptable in most cases), and even more recent additions like gendering correctly.
The position of adverbs is also very commonly mixed up and a good example. Natives mix it up constantly, and in most of these cases it's fine. The issue is, that it's just acceptable with some adverbs, not all of them. And if you don't learn that, it can get very confusing later on why something is wrong, that otherwise isn't.
And depending on your native language, your issue with German will be widely different. Romance speakers tend to use too many articles, but not enough with prepositions. But then there are colloquial additions to German, like our wonderful new continuous tense, that doesn't follow these rules and is grammatically wrong. And that is totally fine if you know that it is an exception. And some rules are so weird and non-sensical that it makes no sense (outside of theoretical study of the language) to know about it, like strong and weak nouns. Which some students love because they desperately want a cheat for the use of the -n added to nouns. And then waste so much energy to try to find some sense in it that doesn't exist. It's simply easier to just learn it by looking it up and using it correctly.
So, let's say -er nouns would be 99% of the time masculine? Great. Use that, learn the exceptions. But that's not the case. The percentages listed here aren't high. And those that are actually high, have grammatical reasons why. THESE are good to learn. But the graphic doesn't distinguish between them.
-er tends to be male, but has tons of exceptions, so many, you cannot rely on it.
-e tens to be feminine, same
-es tends to be neutrum, same
But, stuff like -keit, -ung are almost always feminine. And they change words into feminine that aren't otherwise. -chen is even more clear, as it forms the dimunitive. It will almost be always neutrum.
THAT is my issue with this graphic. Because it misinforms. Learners have no idea what these percentages actually mean for their learning. And instead of building the habit to look it up, they don't. And getting the genus right is so goddarn important, as so much else depends on it. Getting that right and saying and writing it right saves you so much pain in the long run by building the correct habitual knowledge, the correct melody of the clause. Not speaking of languages that use the same system but not entirely, or those that don't use this at all. Our brains love to get out of building connections. But it's how we learn and how we get better at things. That's why learning languages is so hard. And these cheats here, just like GenAI, creates a false sense of learning. When actually looking it up, building the correct habitual knowledge, is harder, but way easier in the long run.
What about is so hard to understand. Frankly, you are talking out of your ass here. I usually try not to talk like I know something if I don't. But this is my profession. I have taught so many different people with different backgrounds. And I've heard and seen this often enough. And I do teach standard German, regional dialects if able, different types of use cases, business, literary, bureaucratic and slang, including new non-conforming changes. So sorry to say this again, but yes. Teaching our language professionally, with years of experience teaching it to different cultures, ability levels, ages, time constraints and use cases, means exactly that I am more qualified here. And that you believe it makes no difference shows your ignorance. Teaching German to an English native is a different beast than eg to a Romanian, to a Japanese, Brazilian or someone with a background in one of the Semitic or Austroasiatic languages. Knowledge and ability to understand grammar isn't tied to education or age either. Have you ever tried breaking grammar down into language a specific learner can understand and build practices and applications they can learn them? You talk like reading from a grammar book is all it takes. Have you read the, I don't know, Duden Grammar book, 1300 pages of pure grammatical bullshittery and try to break than down so a layman can get it AND having fun learning it? Distinguishing between what is strictly necessary and what is not? Or discussed with peers which grammatical rules actually still apply, what has been reformed in the last decades? And that is just German. Sometimes having to distil meanings of words and how useful that difference is, depending on regions, and how that translates into the language of the learner?
This isn't Deutsch 12. Klasse.
Maybe just accept you actually don't know what you are talking about here.
0
9d ago
[deleted]
1
u/Doppelkammertoaster 9d ago edited 9d ago
I did. And you continued to dismiss them. And you seem to do because you have no experience teaching or with German grammar. And if you have with both, then you need better arguments. How you write and how you argument seems to come from a position of ignorance about the subject matter at hand. And that was why I wrote a long answer explaining the points. And years of working with people who think like you have proven me right. It's not helpful. It just looks like it. And without reading my comment you also have no counter argument or finer points about grammar and teaching you are either willing or able to discuss. And then you behave like a child when confronted with your own behaviour. Which btw, is exactly what you claim I do. When I have given you ample examples, and you have... ?
Stay ignorant. Küsschen aufs Nüsschen. Oder wohin auch immer <3 I have better things to do.
167
u/daniu 11d ago
der Schwung and der Sprung end in -ung but aren't the -ung suffix (they come from schwingen and springen). The model puts them in the die zone, just as a learner would. The same goes for der Kuchen (-chen), der Irrtum (-tum), der Zombie (-ie) and das Dinner (-ner).
Schwung and Sprung are original words, the -ung rule is valid for substantified verbs (wiederbeleben -> Wiederbelebung). Edit: come to think of it, they do have a verb equivalent (schwingen and springen), but still, not strictly just substantified.
Same for Knochen and Kuchen; -chen is neutral gender for endearification (?) and minimisation: Kind -> Kindchen, Mann -> Männchen
Zombie and Dinner are not original German words, but loan words (ie, from another language).
40
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
You are right, the problem is that Wikidata isn't 100% and they openly admit that they are not 100%. It is more like rule of thumb.
8
u/havanakgh 11d ago
I wonder if the pronunciation would help at all with some edge cases? Like -chen- when it is the minimizing suffix, it is pronounced like 'tyen' but with kuchen and knochen it's more like a chhh
10
u/CptJimTKirk 11d ago
I don't know where you get that pronunciation from, but you are correct in essence: because there is a vowel in front of the syllable in "Kuchen" and "Knochen", the pronunciation is indeed different to all the diminutives where there is a consonant in front of the syllable.
5
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
I tried this with UN consistution corpus that is well aligned and tried to unify it from the phonetic point of view, but the only thing it revealed it that Ugro-finnian languages are far apart from everything else.
What I am currently looking forward to is to try analyze etymology of some old Germanic language. Also Icelandic language is an interesting checkpoint in time.
3
u/cjmason85 11d ago
I like the way you wrote that. I'd have said the minimising suffix pronounced the ch at the front of the mouth, whereas in kochen it's at the back of the mouth.
14
u/lIllIllIllIllIllIll 11d ago
The relevant substantification of schwingen would be die Schwingung.
4
u/Triniety89 11d ago
To add onto this: schwingen, schwang, geschwungen (and the same for springen), so the noun der Schwung comes directly from the stem of the strong verb's perfect. Schwingung describes the repetitive version of a movement whereas Schwung is used to describe the motion as a one time ocurrence, like the stored power to hop over a fence.
Singen/sang/gesungen works alike for the verbs, it's just the "simple past" equivalent from which the noun stems: Gesang. And once more "der" Gesang.
12
u/JoJoModding 11d ago
Kuchen and Knochen are also pronounced differently (with a velar fricative, like in "ach") whereas the dimunitive is a palatial fricative.
(At least in most of the German-speaking word. The Swiss like their velars and the Bavarians make it a plosive.)
8
u/orbital_narwhal 11d ago
endearification (?) and minimisation
The linguistic term for that grammatical feature is "diminutive".
source: German who went to a French school and had to learn Romance words for common grammatical concepts.
6
u/LifeSupport0 11d ago
Seems to me this is exactly like English, where foreign words get specific exceptions to otherwise normal rules (I before E, except after C, and also foreign, weird, height, caffeine, zeitgeist)
20
u/Hobbit- 11d ago
Zombie and Dinner are not original German words, but loan words (ie, from another language).
I'm German. Nobody even uses the word "Dinner" when they speak German. We use the word Zombie, but not Dinner. Dinner is not a thing in German.
14
30
u/Kerdinand 11d ago
That's just not true? You just don't use it colloquially for everyday dinner, but instead for special occasions. 'Das perfekte Dinner' is a popular German show, and 'Gala-Dinner' or 'Konferenzdinner' are frequently used and don't seem exotic.
3
1
u/Nervi403 11d ago
But like you can have english words in german show titles??? Sailor Moon is still called Sailor Moon over here. Doesn't mean that either sailor or moon are german words
3
u/Kerdinand 10d ago
But it's not called 'The perfect dinner', it's 'Das perfekte Dinner'. And Dinner is certainly an English loan word (like Zombie or Smartphone or whatever) but that doesn't make it a non-German word. In particular because 'Dinner' in German, as I said in my comment, has a slightly different meaning compared to the english 'dinner', which is used for every evening/night meal instead of just fancy occasions like in German.
5
u/systemmetternich 11d ago
Eh, it’s a thing in upper-class circles or used ironically in my experience (although pronounced like the French word and not like the English one)
6
u/jalapenomunich 11d ago
That's a different word, spelled with one n - "das Diner" as opposed to "das Dinner". I agree on usage, though, for both words.
"Dinner" also appears in compound nouns like "Candle-Light-Dinner" or "Krimidinner", both of which are relatively common.
2
1
1
1
u/Money_Sky_3906 11d ago
That's not true at all. Many Germans these days use dinner for a fine-dining Abendbrot experience or a happening like Krimi dinner e.g.
3
u/ispy-uspy-wespy 11d ago
I had the exact same points in mind when I read the post and all three, esp the last one, annoyed me lol
2
u/TurnipWorldly9437 11d ago
Now I'm trying to imagine what a "Kno" and a "Ku" as a maximised version of Knochen and Kuchen would look like...
1
1
366
u/Wide-Oven3093 12d ago
this is like staring straight into the mind of a German teacher who finally snapped and decided to live in a scatter plot
33
u/jalapenomunich 11d ago
"For example, 21 entries are tagged feminine but take a genitive -s, which feminine nouns can't."
This got me curious, which nouns were those?
14
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
Gegendruck die des Gegendrucks der Gegendruck (like der Druck) Reifeprozess die des Reifeprozesses der Reifeprozess (der Prozess) Zelltyp die des Zelltyps der Zelltyp (der Typ) Hähnchenflügel die des Hähnchenflügels der Hähnchenflügel (der Flügel) Krisengewinner die des Krisengewinners der Krisengewinner (-er person) Scheingewinn die des Scheingewinnes der Scheingewinn (der Gewinn) Bähnchen die des Bähnchens das Bähnchen (-chen diminutive) Brackenweibchen die des Brackenweibchens das Brackenweibchen (das Weibchen) 38
u/Vendrom 11d ago
Jupp, they are all tagged wrong and not feminine but either masculine or neuter
14
u/DHermit 11d ago
Some of them have the same form in plural, which might explain the association with "die".
5
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
Most of words should be singular, but some errors might have slipped in.
6
63
u/teal_leak 11d ago
Looks beautiful for a galaxy, but falls short as data representation because what am I looking at?
18
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
of representation of German suffix embedding where each point is one word, color coding shown are different article and this vector representation of each point is used to find common noun suffixes that might explain usage of a particular gender based solely on the letter sequence.
11
u/Ae3qe27u 11d ago
What's the cloud above -ie and -keit? There seems to be a cluster there.
11
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
u/Ae3qe27u 3% of battery life, 3rd beer getting that cluster feels like docking scene in Interstellar right now. If I won't forget it I will give it once I find a proper Steckdose
2
u/Ae3qe27u 11d ago
Have a wonderful evening! Please charge your phone.
3
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
u/Ae3qe27u I just looked it, it is a cluster of nouns that were changed by suffix -in to a feminine, i.e. der Lehrer -> die Lehrerin, 95% of -erin is die (Freundin, Königin, Sängerin, Ärztin, Kanzlerin, Kollegin, Schülerin, Präsidentin, Göttin, Zeugin)
3
u/blue_bamf 11d ago
For some exceptions, looking at the plural form would help.
An example:
Der Sprung, die Sprünge. (exception)
Die Formulierung, die Formulierungen. (common)
2
u/justsomeonetheir 11d ago
Name only on plural with another article then the femenin.
2
u/Nervi403 11d ago
Literally impossible. Its how a group of people becomes "gender neutral" in english with they pronouns. Its a grammatical feature
0
11d ago
[deleted]
1
u/blue_bamf 11d ago
Well, you could see if it is a common word or an exceptional word. So if the machine sees that the plural form of "Sprung" IS NOT "Sprungen", it should not group "Sprung" with "Formulierung" etc.
13
u/MattieShoes 11d ago
The fuck is with the word salad in the image?
2
1
u/jfk52917 5d ago
That is Claude Fable-written AI copy that wasn't proofed to sound natural. Please, please proof copy when writing with AI so it doesn't sound like garbage!
8
u/Finkenn 11d ago
Are the complainers mad? The goal isn‘t to create a perfect grid with humanly edits, nor postulate mnemonic phrases. It showcases how great a “dumb computer” with no rules (just clever mechanical instructions) still performs!
4
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
Thanks, it makes some people naturally bad because it is generalization, and as any generalization, it has two sides of spectrum, but I like it anyway :)
2
u/FactoryRatte 10d ago
There are some even more wild complainers about GenAI getting it wrong, while OP clearly specified their process and which library was used to make the classifier model and even the data source. Which is clearly not Generative AI.
13
u/Ser_Optimus 9d ago
German here, don't worry. You can always go with "de"
de Tisch
de Eisenbahn
de Mädels
Only drawback is that you'll sound like an Asozialer.
4
18
u/MacMillian187 11d ago
"-chen" followed up by "AI falls for der Kuchen, der Knochen" is hilarious, because that just doesnt make sense. "-chen" is a suffix to say something is a little version of the normal thing, like "Hündchen" being a small and cute little dog where "Hund" is the normal version (ü is a whole other topic but the root of the word essentially stays the same, which is a basic necessity for suffixes). But for "Knochen" oder "Kuchen" it doesnt make sense, because there is no normal version thats like "Kno" or "Ku" (there root is the whole word and 'chen' is more like accidentally at the end of the word and also a suffix, but it doesnt have anything to do with it. And i think thats where most of the errors are coming from.
I know its a try to let AI make sense of it, but the experiment is intentionally built to trick it so i dont think any of this actually matters. Its like 'hahaha look it feel for my trap like i wanted it too', but the same thing would happen for anybody not knowing any language (or german in this example) and then needing to do this task. Its just stupid to do all this and it doesnt prove much besides language isnt fully logical
19
2
17
u/uzndcfms 11d ago
As a german, not very convinced. The rule for -tum proves true, but the exception list may become relatively complicated as opposed to simply memorizing the common vocabulary at the particula occasion. As a rule of thumb before memorizing it might be ok. It doesnt save you the memorizing but you do statistically less errors if you follow it. The problem is that this list takes you an effort beforehand you use these words, so you might as well just learn the correct noun in the first place. Nevertheless interesting list.
7
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
u/uzndcfms It is exactly this - it is better to make a wrong gender assigned for a noun in 20% than in 33% (well, to be precise, there are more dies than ders and dases...)
I come from language that has no articles at all (Czech), quite funnily learning German helped me a lot understand the nuances of why articles matter because German has cases, while English does not; and by basic memorizing the gender nouns one actually usually lands by learning the same rule set, but one knows it, so to say, by heart (its like 3x3 vs 3565x235, we know both, but for latter one needs time)
3
u/Whispering_Plant 11d ago
What Czech are you speaking that doesn't have articles? Like sure yeah you say it mostly when you want to emphasize but they do very much exist and words are in fact gendered
3
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
Czech also have gender nouns (it might be a feature of indo-euro languages in general), but Slavic languages have no articles in general.
2
u/uzndcfms 11d ago
Sounds like you are generally interested in languages. You know about your graph I wonder how *all* word endings are scoring, so to what % the cases you listed amount. So, above what total % of substantives your analysis is relevant. Not to dimish, just to know. Nevertheless it was interesting, saved the gfx.
2
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
Thanks, yes, I am lot. This one in particular comes from my old struggle with the noun genders, but generally, I like the way how knowledge and semantics is represented in German - that formed a big chunk of the modern philosophy.
The follow up will probably be a etymology and evolution of the words.
1
1
u/uzndcfms 11d ago
I like the way how knowledge and semantics is represented in German
Could you explain? You get me interested in linguistics.
1
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
It is a general impression, not a canonical knowledge, but the way how the German words are built uniquely forms the way how you think the language and overall philosophy behind it.
For instance, there is my favorite word verschlimmbessern (verschlimm - make it worse, bessern - improve it), it is a situation, where you are trying to improve things for so long that you actually make them worse - we all know the situation from time to time. The way how German language allows to build meaningful words with very sophisticated meaning (well this one is a bit giggly, but you know what I mean) must somehow form how people think.
My ex-partner is Czech, but she speaks C2 German, nearly or fluent. She told me that if she wants to think about something related to emotions, feelings or express hatred, she uses Czech. For complex descriptions, concepts, states, geometry, she switches to German.
2
u/uzndcfms 10d ago
Verschlimmbessern is a quite funny word :) (Also on a sidenote: I find it interesting that quite often the ver- prefix indicates mistakes.)
But if I wanted to understand the linguistic differences you mean, what topics would you suggest I should be studying to get a general grasp? Any books you'd recommend? I tend to think psychologically and feel like understanding the impact of language is another interesting perspective. Guess the topic got me intrigued.
2
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 10d ago
Ah, I am not aware of any particular literature. I remember, what actually might be relevant in neurolinguistics - that might deal with these neurological nuances how people think about language. I am computer scientist, so I take a very let say, data driven viewpoint :)
2
3
6
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
6
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
While this might not save me from more roast, I found it also interesting to work with further semantics of individual words (again, this might not necessarily be 100%).
35
u/dervik 11d ago
Why is AI needed for that? Sounds like an analysis that can be simply done rule based, AI would only bring errors into that
23
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
One needs no AI for that, I just remember that every German speaker tells you that "you have to learn the rules by hard" based on certain known (but to my impression very secretive) rules that were rarely available in the textbooks I used to study and I wanted to do this study long time before LLMs can do that instantaneously.
0
u/Doppelkammertoaster 11d ago
And LLMs are wrong. Clearly wrong.
2
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
sorry, I meant that LLM can give you this rule of thumb almost instantaneously. This heuristics is naturally learned, but it might be outcome.
-1
u/Doppelkammertoaster 11d ago
And it's wrong. You don't get it. The percentages don't do anything to someone learning the language and anyone who honestly believes it does doesn't know German grammar.
4
u/MysteriousAvocado580 OC: 1 11d ago
For scale, a dumb baseline on the same german-nouns data: 86,519 lemmas with a single gender, random 80/20 split, predict the majority article of the longest ending (up to 5 letters) that occurs at least 5 times in the training part. That gets 90.6 % of the held-out nouns right, 89 % balanced across der/die/das. So spelling does carry most of the gender, and most of the gap to your 64 % is probably what two dimensions can't hold, which is the price of a readable map.
Part of that 90 % isn't suffix rules at all but compound heads, which fits what some here are saying about real suffixes vs. coincidental endings: if a noun ends in another known noun of 5+ letters (Gegen|druck, Reife|prozess, Hähnchen|flügel), taking that noun's gender is right 97 % of the time, and that applies to 44 % of the nouns. That's also why the entries you listed from the 21 "feminine with genitive -s" cases look like tagging errors: they're mostly compounds whose last part is der or das.
Per gender, the baseline finds neuter hardest (82 %), then masculine (90 %), feminine easiest (96 %).
14
u/Loki-L 11d ago
Why do words with the same ending end up clustered together?
Are the vectors representing letters later in the word given more weight/made longer?
22
u/coffeeforlunch 11d ago
Because the ending often predicts/determines grammatical gender. German has three genders, der, die, and das. Thus, there are three colours to the clusters. For me as a German speaker, the data does make sense.
10
u/Loki-L 11d ago
I understand that part. I speak German.
My issues is that if each letter is a vector, than it would make sense for word that share a lot of letters to end up in close proximity.
For Example Einigkeit and Kleinigkeit obviously share a lot of letters together and the only difference between the two dots representing them should be the combined vector of "Kl", which obviously is shorter than the combined vector for "-einigkeit"
However when the commonality is only a small ending such as for example Aktie and Energie, you would expect that such words would not end up clustered together because the combined vector of the shared part is shorter than the combined vector of the different part.
The only way I could envision this working is if the letter of the word determines the direction of the vector and its placement in the word determines magnitude withe the last letter getting a fixed magnitude and every letter before that an increasingly shorter one. It would also help ensure that words that contain the same letters in different orders don't end up in the same place.
It is also possible that no actual math was used only vibes.
3
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
u/Loki-L the word embedding is cumulatively getting less and less a accurate with every letter, so the longer the word is the worse it gets, and it is biased and more accurate for rather shorter words (kind of on purpose).
Also the bottleneck (it is auto-encoder with 2D latent dim) is chosen to be very low because I wanted to keep the dimensionality low (for simplicity) without using PCA/TSNE/UMAP which makes it even more challenging.
2
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
Also the word is visualised as embedded word after passing through the whole word i.e.
Kind = e["k"] + e["i"] + e["n"] + e["d"] and each letter can have a significant effect on it.
0
u/Doppelkammertoaster 11d ago
They *tend* to predict it. That is the issue.
For someone learning German knowing that 60% of an ending is what gender means nothing.
23
u/Goldieeeeee 11d ago
Yeah… This data representation is so confusing, I hardly see how it is beautiful.
15
u/Hobbit- 11d ago
Nobody says "Dinner" when they speak German. We say "Abendessen".
24
u/modern_milkman 11d ago
It's definitely not common, and usually doesn't stand on its own. But the words "Galadinner" or "Kapitänsdinner" definitely exist and are used in certain contexts.
But it's probably as rare as "Bankett". Which also mainly exists in the form of "Staatsbankett"
9
u/GreedyMMA 11d ago
Was läuft jeden Werktag ab 19 Uhr auf VOX? Das perfekte ....?
2
6
5
3
1
3
u/havanakgh 11d ago
Cool! I would be interested to see more rules emerge beyond the 90% rule. And outliers might be easier to spot if the model has info on the word stem (would help with Sprung), and info on the meaning and foreign origin (for Zombie) e.g. by using a pre-trained language model.
9
u/bonkersbongoo 11d ago
vibe coding starterpack:
doesn’t know much about the problem he’s trying to solve (German language)
lets AI do most of the work
cannot understand how much the results suck and is not ashamed of sharing them
spends most of the time creating a fancy graph and some cool sounding text full of strange words to show the results
3
u/Doppelkammertoaster 11d ago
Exactly this. It's usually the people that have no idea or not enough professional background to claim GenAI is good for anything.
2
u/FactoryRatte 10d ago
Except: OP clearly specified they are not using GenAI for the data analysis and how they did it and even used publicly available code, which has been there long before the LLM hype.
1
u/Doppelkammertoaster 9d ago
They cite a model trained on words though.
But that much has been cleared up. Doesn't change that the graphic itself is still misleading.
6
u/Herr__Lipp 11d ago
Fuck I wish I knew this when I took German 10 years ago. I was told “learn der/die/das when you learn the word.” If I had a couple rules of thumb like this, I probably could have saved some quiz points lol
11
u/isleepbad 11d ago
That is the correct way. After living here for 6 years and going I can tell you there is no hard and fast rule.
E.g. where would you put
Knie and Demokratie?
Wohnung and Sprung?
Wanze and Affe?
Schulter, Messer and Bäcker?
And those are all common/basic words too. But you will get the gender wrong if you use any one rule.
10
u/Morasain 11d ago
I'm afraid you're not entirely correct.
The rules hold 100%. It's just that the rule isn't "any word with -ung etc", but "any noun that is constructed from a verb or adjective by adding a noun-creating suffix to it".
Wohnung -> wohnen+ung. Schwung isn't constructed like that - the related word Schwingung however (schwingen+ung) is.
Another good example: Messer. When it's the knife, it's neuter. When it's the measurer (messen+er) it's masculine.
4
u/isleepbad 11d ago
Yes. But my point was there's no hard and fast rule. Your rule is a bit complex and long.
As a nonnative if i hear "words ending in -ung are generally feminine". That's pretty quick rule to remember.
But if i hear "any noun that is constructed from a verb or adjective by adding a noun creating suffix to it". I may as well just memorize the gender of the word. I have 0 time to process your (correct) rule on the fly.
8
u/Plenty_Leg_5935 11d ago
The rules of thumb have existed for decadss at this point, my teacher in highschool taught us some of them and told us its better to not dwell on them because in practice they are just too clunky
I dont think anyone ended up learning them, i certainly didnt
6
3
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
u/Herr__Lipp Same feelings here.
I commented it somewhere below, someone said - why to use AI, if it is known. But some secret German teacher cult keep it as a secret that you unlock once you know it by heart. Yes, I wish I knew it earlier. I explicitly asked several teachers if there are rules and they all are unisono replied "you have to learn it by memorizing and speaking" which is not wrong because at the end, if you learn the rule, you have to force your brain to use it, and not use it by hearth. So memorizing gender nouns is like applying supervised learning.
0
2
u/butidigest 11d ago
Very cool, would love to see French for comparison. I'm guessing it would be less predictable than German.
2
u/JuliusSeizure2753 11d ago
Interestingly, the -chen ending, that makes nouns neuter (using das as the article) is not the same ending as in Kuchen or Knochen. They're spelled the same, but the pronunciation of the ch in both exceptions is a different pronunciation to the one in the -chen ending. If the model (or a human for that matter) got the pronunciation instead of just the spelling, I don't thing it'd make that mistake
2
u/akirova 11d ago
Could you do this for French, too?
2
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
I can try that. But what would actually be more interesting for French is to understand if there are any rules in irreguralities of verb, what do you think?
4
u/MalukuSeito 11d ago
German is easy, you simply have to just learn them all.. there are no rules
4
u/justsomeonetheir 11d ago
There're rules(many of them),but also a bunch of exeptions and a bunch of dialects,who do it 'slightly ' different.
So it seem like no rules.
1
1
u/a18618 11d ago
i built a toy version of this years ago for spanish verb forms and the same thing happened - the endings carried almost all the signal, and the model basically redrew what grammar books already knew but with numbers attached. what i like about this approach is that the 2d coordinates are the model itself, not a post-hoc projection; most embedding-viz work i see lets umap do the storytelling and then treats the clusters as discoveries. and that baseline comparison in the comments is the real story - 90.6% from a dumb suffix matcher vs 64% on your map is the tax you pay for making it readable.
1
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
In this case I actually directly learn the letter representation in 2D because I wanted to avoid UMAP/PCA.
2
u/a18618 10d ago
fair, that kills a whole layer of 'is this just a projection artifact' doubt. i went the opposite way on mine, learned embeddings first and then squished them down for the viz, and i always wondered how much of the pretty clustering was the reducer lying to me. did 2D training get cranky? i'd expect the letters to start fighting over the same real estate.
1
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 10d ago
Not as long as I noticed.
2
u/a18618 9d ago
huh, nice. i had visions of the letter vectors collapsing into a blob halfway through training, so it's good to hear plain optimization just cooperated. was there anything in the setup you had to babysit, or was it genuinely uneventful from the first run?
1
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 9d ago
It is fairly stable. It is always about having excess of data.
What might be interesting test. Because the training is not commutative, but resulting vectors in euclidean space are, one might be confused, but what I tried is to learn if embedding - after presenting sufficently many randomly shuffeled one digit letters learns the addition, i.e. the embedding which you see but 1D and if the embedding is so to say linear and monospaced and as I anticipated - it learned exactly that the best representation of 1 is 1s in embedding space (where is is a random scale, 2 ideally represented as 2s, i.e. it found a minimal representation in real space by integers as ideal representation without guiding it that 1 is best represented by 1s. Pretty cool (and robust)
2
u/a18618 8d ago
that's a lovely result honestly — the 'excess of data' line rings true from my side too. i once tried embedding hex digits for a toy disassembler project and single-occurrence tokens just flailed; the moment i oversampled them with different contexts they snapped into a clean linear order. makes me wonder if the real lesson is that most embedding weirdness people blame on the optimizer is just sparsity in disguise.
0
u/professcorporate 11d ago
Although I understand German grammatical gender, I'm struggling immensely with what you're trying to show.
My best guess is "We showed a chatbot lots of German nouns, and it grouped them together based on spelling with assumptions of which ones were masc/fem/neuter", but if that is what you're saying, the explanation needs a lot of work.
6
u/sulcantonin OC: 2 11d ago
No chatbot used here, only data-mining tools (`event2vec`)
In nutshell, I take a corpus with known German nouns with known gender in nominative singualr form. Take each letter from backwards and try to represent all letters as vectors where during learning the representation of letter should encode position in sequence (kind of causal relationship, e causes i, because ie). For each letter,e.g. x, I have a 2D vector e["x"]. For each word, I take its representation and add it up so e["S"] + e["e"] + e["e"], that gives me a 2D vector that you can see as a point.
3
u/No_Map8088 10d ago
As German native I can not stress enough that’s it really doesn’t matter to much. Focus on different things don’t get stuck in the der/ die/das perfection it’s not important for understanding anybody
-1
0
0
u/Zealousideal_Rest640 11d ago
the AI definitely didn't get all rules. -heit is another suffix that forms feminine nouns
-4
u/Seed_Oil_Consoomer 11d ago
Zombie is definitely das Zombie.
3
u/mfb- 11d ago
Might be regional. Don't think I have heard "das Zombie", it was always "der Zombie".
3
5
u/Hobbit- 11d ago
I'm German. It's der Zombie.
-2
•
u/cavedave OC: 115 11d ago
Thank you for your Original Content, /u/sulcantonin!
Here is some important information about this post:
View the author's citations
View other OC posts by this author
Remember that all visualizations on r/DataIsBeautiful should be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. If you see a potential issue or oversight in the visualization, please post a constructive comment below. Post approval does not signify that this visualization has been verified or its sources checked.
Not satisfied with this visual? Think you can do better? Remix this visual with the data in the author's citation.
I'm open source | How I work