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English: A vs. An

365 points · 529 comments · azhenley

  1. jonplackett · · focus · HN ↗
    A while ago I made an algorithm to swap the gender in fairy stories.

    (Genderswappedstories.com)

    And I found another English weirdness trying to swap between his/him and her/hers.

    Him always swaps to her

    Eg it was him - it was her

    But his can swap to her or hers

    It is his -> it is hers

    It is his thing -> it is her thing.

    And her can also swap to him or his

    It was her -> it was him

    It was her thing -> it was his thing

    And hers always swaps to his.

    So hers and him are the only completely predictable - and they don’t even mean the same thing!

    I had to write a very in-depth algorithm to work out the type of words surrounding the words - if they are nouns, adjectives etc - in each sentence to correctly guess the swaps. But even after that some were unpredictable due to word order keeping the important words apart. all I could do 100% reliably was to flag the ones that might be ambiguous to check. Of course now I could just get an LLM to check it!

    Can anyone explain why this happens?

    1. [deleted] · · focus · HN ↗

      [deleted]

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