TL;DR

Expanding verbs from Nuovo vocabolario di base.

In recent post Expanding words in NVdB I introduced the idea of finding variants for basic words as found in Nuovo vocabolario di base, so that we can get more entropy bits and hopefully get rid of longer words in exchange.

Verbs can provide a good deal of alternative forms, as we saw. It’s actually much more than that, because every tense usually adds new words. On the other hand, I decided to avoid less “direct” tenses (like condizionale and congiuntivo) to keep the spirit of very wide usage of the starting vocabolario.

To do the expansion, I started from this repository: ian-hamlin/verb-data. It’s actually an extraction from the Wiktionary, and a pretty useful one I daresay because everything is neaty put into consistent JSON files.

The basic reasoning is simple: for every word in the starting list, see if there’s a verb in the wiktionary and, in case, expand the word using some variations (not all, because some are composite and we want to avoid them). So I ended up with this:

sub load_verb_expansions ($set_for, $filename) {
   state $is_interesting_group = {
      map { $_ => 1 }
        qw<
        infinitive
        gerund
        presentparticiple
        pastparticiple
        indicative/present
        indicative/imperfect
        incative/pasthistoric
        indicative/future
        >
   };
   my $record_for = decode_json(path($filename)->slurp_raw);

   for my $word (keys $set_for->%*) {
      DEBUG "verb<$word>";
      my $record = $record_for->{$word} or next;
      my @words  = grep { !m{\W}mxs }
        map  { split m{(,\s*)+}mxs, $_->{value} =~ s{\A\s+|\s+\z}{}rgmxs }
        grep { $is_interesting_group->{$_->{group}} }
        $record->{conjugations}->@*;
      DEBUG " --> words(@words)";
      add_related($set_for, $word, @words) if @words;
   } ## end for my $word (keys $set_for...)

   return $set_for;
} ## end sub load_verb_expansions

We’ll discuss the data model in due time, it suffices to say that $set_for contains one hash for each word from the vocabulary that we’re interested into, so we iterate over its keys to get back to the words. $filename is the path to the file where all verbs forms have been collected, and add_related is a way to add these new words in the $set_for hash.

Stay safe!