What do you call someone who fuses multiple objects together?

Question

What do you call someone who fuses multiple objects together?

Is "fusioner" the right adjective of the noun "fusion"? I cannot find it in the dictionaries.

EDIT:

I am developing a machine learning algorithm that combines multiple neural networks. The way it does it is by fusing the last hidden layers, which in computer language, are numeric vectors like the following:

LHL1 = [2,4,6,2,7,3,2,4,6]
LHL2 = [6,3,4,7,8,3,2,4,9]
LHL3 = [2,2,8,8,9,9,3,2,4]

fused_LHL = [2,4,6,2,7,3,2,4,6,6,3,4,7,8,3,2,4,9,2,2,8,8,9,9,3,2,4]

I am thinking of a name for my algorithm and inspired by the operation of vector fusion, I thought to name it "Neural Network Fusioner". But as already mentioned, I am not sure if the word "Fusioner" exists, and if not, which would be the most appropriate alternative word.

Answer 1

If you are committed to thinking of the operation as "fusion", then I'd agree with some other commenters that the noun is "fuser".

If all of your fusions are concatenations (as they are in this example), concatenator seems like a good name, as suggested in another answer. This is somewhat more common for strings than for vectors, but it works.

You could also look at this operation as flattening, which is an established name for taking a vector of vectors of A, and joining them together to make a vector of A. That would make the the node that does the flattening a flattener.

A more-general option is to see this as a reduction, that is to say that the operation is a reduce operation. That makes the noun reducer. This is quite a common name in functional-programming contexts. The main problem with this name is that it is quite general indeed; you probably have other parts of your machine learning pipeline which would fit this word as well.

Answer 2

The original poster is concatenating arrays, so he is a concatenator.

The process of welding fuses material together. A person who welds things together is a welder.

Extracting the flavor of something into a liquid is infusion. A device used to infuse things is an infuser.

Answer 3

You are right that the suffix -er can be added to a verb, thus creating a noun that refers to the person or thing that does that action. So, for example:

• a dancer is one who dances
• a jogger is one who jogs
• a framer is one who frames
• a washer and dryer are appliances that wash and dry

Many of these words are common, immediately recognizable and having their own dictionary entries – for example, teacher, writer, farmer, stapler, skydiver, etc. However, it's not always quite so simple.

For example, the person that conducts an auction is called an auctioneer, not an "auctioner," and a person that works puppets is a puppeteer, not a "puppeteer." Moreover, the person who pilots a plane is called a pilot, not a "piloter" or "piloteer," while a person who is typing is usually called a typist, not a "typer."

Some verbs simply don't get turned into nouns that often, and if you try to do so, your word processor might use a red squiggly line to alert you that you're using a non-standard word. For example, you may win a chess match, but people might look at you funny if you claim to be a "checkmater;" a trucker may jackknife his truck, but you probably won't find many credible news outlets calling him a "jackknifer."

So, could you use "fuser" or "fusioner" to mean "one who fuses multiple objects together"? You could, but, as your research has already shown, it's not a very common word. I can think of three ways to handle this:

1. Use a more precise term, depending on what kind of "fusing" is being done. Words like welder, combiner, mixer, builder, etc., are not as generic, but won't frazzle your spellchecker nearly so much.

2. If you are writing a paper, you could coin the term in your paper. That is, you could write something like this:

We call the person who fuses these components together the fusioner.

3. You could used scare quotes to signal the reader that you know this is a non-standard word, but you are using it anyway because you can't think of anything more suitable. For example, you could write:

The components are joined together by a "fusioner" who typically builds four units per hour.