in reply to Pronouncible TLA's?

I'm not sure that you can come up with a program that can do what the human brain can do. The number of combinations (17K+) is not all that big.

If you developed an application that allowed native english speakers to "vote" with suggested psuedo pronounications, then I'm guess that 50 volunteers each making 500-1,000 decisions could work out? Some TLA's would need to be reviewed by more than one person.

I've written some "voting code" before with complex decisions that my algorithms just couldn't do. About 200 decisions per person wound up being "doable". Instead of improving the algorithms, I spent the time on a fancy GUI to allow the humans to weigh in on the 0.5% of really hard problems. My situation was different than this, but some similarities exist.

Part of the issue here is that TLA's are application specific. Example, TRS-80, The Radio Shack model 80. TRS80 became known as "Trash80". A human could come with "trash" for TRS, but I don't see how a computer program could do that? This prounaction also had to with rep from manufacturer, a very situation specific. I'm not sure that any program could do what you are attempting. But it doesn't appear that this needs to be "re-calculated" easily in a completely automated process. My suggestion is to "divide and conquer" with a small army of humans guided by a good application program.

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Re^2: Pronouncible TLA's?
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Apr 28, 2016 at 22:46 UTC
    My suggestion is to "divide and conquer" with a small army of humans guided by a good application program.

    What a cool idea. Maybe stumping up for Amazon's Mechanical Turk (or whatever it is called) is the cheapest solution.

    (Might need clear eligibility rules for the native language/country of origin to ensure some consistency; but that's probably not PC.)

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[reply]
      That is an interesting thought. I hadn't heard of Mechanical Turk before.

      I suspect what will happen is that some folks will emerge who are both a) really good at it and b) enjoy it because it is kind of like a puzzle, and some of those folks will wind up spending a lot of time on it.

      Of course there will be some folks who are really bad at the task, but will want to participate nevertheless.

      I'm not sure that everybody should be "equal". Some kind of review committee could be setup with an invited group of the gurus (first category above). You could view the main crowd as a big idea generation machine. I think reviewing and rejecting bad ideas is an easier task that coming up with the idea in the first place.

      I'm not sure that having alternate pronunciations is a problem? If I see LCK, I immediately come to "lock", but someone else might say oh, that is "luck". In a dictionary, there are often multiple meanings and definitions. I presume that the same thing will happen here.

      An interesting problem.

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