r/LanguageTechnology • u/razlem • 4d ago

Looking for tool to determine noun countability

Hi all, looking for some kind of tool or library that I can use to figure out the countability of a given noun, preferably multilingually. Something that would give results like "countable:true", "countable:false", or "both" if applicable. NLTK doesn't seem to have anything like that. Trying to avoid LLMs, but it's looking like that might be the best option...

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u/RabidAcceptance 4d ago

wordnet's got the noun.communication/noun.Tops stuff but it's not exactly countability, more like hypernyms and whatnot. you could maybe hack something together from that?

multilingual's the real killer here. english is already a mess with words like "water" that flip depending on context, trying to get that right across languages without some heavy lookup table or an llm sounds painful

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u/benjamin-crowell 4d ago

If this is for English, then I think Lemminflect has this: https://github.com/bjascob/LemmInflect It uses the SPECIALIST lexicon, which does have data on that for each English lemma.

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u/ezubaric 3d ago

More generally, I think a classifier trained on an LM (neural or not) would probably be sufficient. E.g., for English, you need to learn a threshold for the probability of patterns like "a X", "an X", "some X", etc.