Google Summer of Code/Application 2009

This page lists our current application for Google Summer of Code. The ideas page can be found here.

Current application

Notes for applicants here: selection criteria, advice for mentors, and here is the FAQ

Answers to the descriptive questions should probably be 2--3 paragraphs at most, according to advice from #gsoc.

Fill out the application form here.

Application

Describe your organisation.

• The Apertium project is a project which works on open-source machine translation and language technology. We try and focus our efforts on lesser-resourced and marginalised languages, but also work with larger languages. The project is being developed in several universities and companies across Europe, with the principal part of the development on the engine being done by the Transducens research group of the Universitat d'Alacant (Alacant, Spain) and Prompsit Language Engineering. There are currently 17 published language pairs within the project (including a number of "firsts" — for example Spanish—Occitan and Basque—Spanish), and several more in development.

Why is your organisation applying to participate in GSoC 2009? What do you hope to gain by participating?

• Both organisations are very interested in seeing Apertium improve in many different directions. The Universitat, mainly because most of its research in the field of machine translation is based on Apertium components. Prompsit, because it bases its business in providing Apertium-based services.
• Apertium as a whole will benefit from increased participation from outside the core group of developers: we will get new or improved tools which will help to improve translation quality for users and developers alike.

Did your organisation participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarise your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.

• n/a

If your organisation has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?

• We applied in 2008, but unfortunately did not get through the selection procedure. We received some helpful feedback which we are taking into account when applying this year.

What licence(s) does your project use?

• GNU GPL 2.0/3.0

What is the URL for your ideas page?

• http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Ideas_for_Google_Summer_of_Code

What is the main development mailing list or forum for your organisation?

• apertium-stuff@lists.sourceforge.net

What is the main IRC channel for your organisation?

• #apertium on irc.freenode.net

Does your organisation have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.

• We expect students to contact us using IRC or e-mail; we will make sure we get the following information from all applicants:

• Name and e-mail address
• Current field of study / major
• Whether they have programmed before in an open-source project
• Why is it that they are interested in machine translation
• Why is it that they are interested in the Apertium project
• Which task they are interested in, and why

Who will be your backup organisation administrator? Please include Google Account information.

• Gema Ramírez Sánchez (Prompsit Language Engineering S.L.), <gramirez at gmail.com>

Who will your mentors be? Please include Google Account information.

• Francis Tyers <francis.tyers at gmail.com>
• Mikel L. Forcada <mikel.forcada at gmail.com>
• Jimmy O'Regan <joregan at gmail.com>
• Felipe Sánchez Martínez <fsanchez at gmail.com>
• Sergio Ortiz Rojas <sergio.ortiz at gmail.com>
• Jacob Nordfalk <jacob.nordfalk at gmail.com>

What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

• They are all developers at the Apertium project:

• Francis Tyers is a graduate student of Computer Science at the Universitat d'Alacant and also works for Prompsit Language Engineering. He is one of the main developers on the Welsh to English translator, is working on the Breton to French translator, and is responsible for Debian packaging and maintenance.

• Mikel L. Forcada is a professor of Computer Science and has led all of the research that has been done at the Universitat d'Alacant in the field of machine translation. He is responsible for much of the current design of Apertium.

• Jimmy O'Regan is based in Ireland, he is the instigator and developer of the English--Polish language pair, and also works on Irish. He has also been a writer for the Linux Gazette.

• Felipe Sánchez Martínez is an lecturer in Computer Science at the Universitat d'Alacant. He is responsible for coding the part-of-speech tagger of Apertium as well as the maintainer of packages apertium-tagger-training-tools and apertium-transfer-tools, which allow developers of Apertium language-pair data to induce the part-of-speech tagger and an initial set of translation rules from monolingual and bilingual corpora.

• Sergio Ortiz-Rojas is the senior programmer at Prompsit Language Engineering and is responsible for most of the code in Apertium (except the parts written by Felipe Sánchez Martínez); he is, therefore, the developer of reference when it comes to develop new code for the platform.

• Jacob Nordfalk is an associate professor of Computer Science and author of several books on programming in Java in Danish. He is the primary developer on the English--Esperanto pair and has also done a lot of work on apertium-dixtools.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

Students will be encouraged to let us know how they want to break up their time, and to try and plan for holidays and absences. This will avoid both mentors and students wasting time. If a mentor reports the unscheduled disappearance of a student (72-hour silence), he will be contacted by the administrators. If silence persists, his task will be frozen and we will report to Google.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

It is quite unlikely, since all of the mentors are very active developers, with long term commitment to the project. If a mentor fails to respond adequately to a student, he or she will have been instructed to contact the administrators. The administrators will examine the situation; if disappearance (48 hour silence) is confirmed, they will assign a different mentor to them, and inform Google.

What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?

• We will make sure most developers are available as long as possible at the #apertium IRC channel, so that they get guidance with any problem they may have during development or before taking decisions on what task to select.
• We will try to get them involved as early as possible in the project, by granting them developer status, so they can modify code and data as any other developer would.
• Depending on the number of projects chosen for development, we will organise an optional workshop in Alacant so that the students may present their work to the wider group.

What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?

• Whenever there is a relevant research or development component in their work, we will make sure they can use it as part of their undergraduate or graduate work, and offer guidance when writing papers.

Archived applications

• /Application, 2008