It's like an interview question from hell. Reversing a trie is those things that I might ever use once in my life, but that one time I will look like an absolute wizard.

I remember that when I was first learning Spanish in high school, I found a piece of (Windows) software that pelted you with a series of pairs of an infinitive and a tense, and you had to conjugate the infinitive accordingly. (Spanish conjugation typically changes the end of the word; irregular verbs tend to involve stem changes). It was fantastic practice and really ingrained the rules; I became a whiz at it.

When I started learning Russian, the declensions (like the ones mentioned in the article) really threw me for a loop. I looked all over for a similar app to explain the patterns and drill rote practice, but never found one.

While slightly off-topic, does anyone know of such an app (web-based or macOS/iOS)?

A possible alternative, especially for beygla/strict, would be perfect hashing.

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Doesn't that look like an interesting approach for highly optimized embeddings?

No idea if Rails copes with this automatically, but it feels like the sort of magic it’s historically been really good at. I remember reading the source code for `pluralise` and finding that someone had encoded the pluralisation rules including irregular cases for Welsh.

For the 800 names that were missing declension data in the database, it seems like the most straightforward thing to do would be to assign their declensions by hand. It shouldn't take a native speaker more than a couple of hours (if some name they haven't seen before is ambiguous, then whatever they guess at least won't sound obviously wrong to other native speakers). Alternatively, very cheap to ask an LLM to do it.

Encoding them into a trie like this would still be a good way to distribute the result, but you don't have to rely on the trie also being a good way to guess the declensions.

Hmm, is this lib GDPR compliant?