etymology on Kai Striega

Curiously Related Words Constructing Our Query

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 08:25:52 +1100

Querying data#

Neo4j uses a query language called Cypher¹. Cypher was inspired by ASCII art and lets us represent our ideas very intuitively. Nodes are represented as being in parentheses while relationships are shown as arrows between nodes. If you have some spare time I’d suggest you play around with Cypher before continuing to familiarize yourself.

What did we want?#

If we go way back to the original post we said we wanted two things:

Curiously Related Words in Neo4j

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 08:08:07 +1100

What we have#

In the previous post I showed how to parse EtymDB and convert it into a format usable by the admin-import tool. We should now have five csv files:

vertex/full.csv
vertex/small.csv
vertex/with_embedding.csv
vertex/with_meaning.csv
relationships.csv

Getting Neo4j#

Neo4j in the cloud#

Neo4j provides a cloud service with a free tier. Unfortunately, the free tier is capped at 200k nodes and 400k relationships. We’ve 1.8M nodes and 640k relationships. Unfortunately the free tier is not going to cut it.

Curiously Related Words Preprocessing Our Data

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 15:32:41 +1100

Previously I’ve made up the concept of a curiously connected word and a high level plan for finding such words. This post outlines the interesting parts of how I parse EtymDB. For those who are interested in all the code, it is available on my GitHub.

The data we have, and why that’s not enough#

As outlined previously we have two sources of data:

EtymDB a database of words and their etymological relationships
gensim a library of Word2vec models that model the semantic relationship between words

Our goal is to combine these two datasets into something nerdy. But just having data isn’t enough. We need to be able to retrieve, analyse and work with our datasets efficiently. Furthermore, our data isn’t really tabular. What we have are words, with some associated properties, and relationships between them. When you hear “relationships” you may be tempted to think of a relational database. While these are often the right choice, our data is a graph which can be difficult to work with in relational databases ¹. Neo4j provides a database that is specialised on graphs. This seems like the right tool for the job. Plus I want to try a new tool².

What is a Curiously Related Word?

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 12:53:46 +1100

What brought this on?#

Did you know that the words “Galaxy” and “Lactose” are related? They both derive from the Proto-Indo-European word “glakt” which means “Milk”. I didn’t. And, when a friend told me this, I was intrigued. As a computer nerd, this brought up another question: can I automate finding such words?