User:Firespeaker/Steps for writing a language pair - Revision history

Firespeaker: justification

2013-05-20T07:55:56Z

justification

Firespeaker at 07:53, 20 May 2013

2013-05-20T07:53:04Z

Firespeaker: /* Transfer */

2013-05-20T07:49:53Z

Transfer

Firespeaker: /* Document Grammatical Differences (Comparative Grammar) */

2013-05-20T05:49:27Z

Document Grammatical Differences (Comparative Grammar)

Firespeaker at 05:48, 20 May 2013

2013-05-20T05:48:43Z

Firespeaker: /* Transducers */

2013-05-20T05:46:18Z

Transducers

Firespeaker: /* Comparative Grammar */

2013-05-20T05:42:15Z

Comparative Grammar

Firespeaker: /* Comparative Grammar */

2013-05-20T05:41:24Z

Comparative Grammar

Firespeaker: /* Document Resources */

2013-05-20T05:36:36Z

Document Resources

Firespeaker: /* Evaluation */ criteria

2013-05-20T05:29:30Z

Evaluation: criteria

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 {{TOCD}}
+This guide is meant to be a brief overview of the steps involved in writing a language pair.  It is different from the [[Apertium New Language Pair HOWTO]] in that it simply provides an overview of everything that should be done (with links to more information) as opposed to delving into the details.  It can be used as an introduction for total beginners, or as a basic reference for people familiar with certain stages of the process who wish to explore other stages or the entire process.
 == Document Available Resources ==

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 === Chunking ===
-If the syntax of the languages are really different, or to handle a few pieces of divergence, you'll want to do syntactic chunking.  You may use [[Helsinki Apertium Workshop/Session 6]] as a guide for how to do chunking.  Chunking is rather involved, so it's recommended that you avoid it until absolutely necessary.  For closely related languages, you can get fairly good results without reverting to chunking.
+If the syntax of the languages are really different, or to handle a few pieces of divergence, you'll want to do syntactic chunking.  You may use [[Helsinki Apertium Workshop/Session 6]] and [[Chunking]] as guides for how to do chunking.  Chunking is rather involved, so it's recommended that you avoid it until absolutely necessary.  For closely related languages, you can get fairly good results without reverting to chunking.
 == Evaluate the pair ==
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 You can learn more about [[testvoc]] and how to perform one.
+[[Category:HOWTO]]
+[[Category:Documentation in English]]

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 Files are apertium-xxx-yyy.xxx-yyy.t*x and apertium-xxx-yyy.yyy-xxx.t*x, where the second language in the file's pair name is the one whose output needs to be controlled.  You can read more about transfer rules at [[A long introduction to transfer rules]].
+=== Chunking ===
+If the syntax of the languages are really different, or to handle a few pieces of divergence, you'll want to do syntactic chunking.  You may use [[Helsinki Apertium Workshop/Session 6]] as a guide for how to do chunking.  Chunking is rather involved, so it's recommended that you avoid it until absolutely necessary.  For closely related languages, you can get fairly good results without reverting to chunking.
 == Evaluate the pair ==

@@ Line 5: / Line 5: @@
 == Document Grammatical Differences (Comparative Grammar) ==
-Make a page on this wiki systematically comparing the grammar of the two languages.  This can range from simple differences, such as how plurals are formed or the word order of noun phrases (e.g., Adjective Noun versus Noun Adjective), to high-level differences, such as how passivised relative clauses are formed.  Some good examples of such pages include [[English_and_Esperanto/Outstanding_tests]] and [[Welsh_to_English/Regression_tests]].  Like with these pages, you should probably plan to keep track of which points you've been able to handle (through the implementation of various rules—see below) and which points remain unhandled.
+Make a page on this wiki systematically comparing the grammar of the two languages.  This can range from simple differences, such as how plurals are formed or the word order of noun phrases (e.g., Adjective Noun versus Noun Adjective), to high-level differences, such as how passivised relative clauses are formed.  Some good examples of such pages include [[English and Esperanto/Outstanding tests]] and [[Welsh to English/Regression tests]].  Like with these pages, you should probably plan to keep track of which points you've been able to handle (through the implementation of various rules—see below) and which points remain unhandled.
 == Design Transducers ==

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+{{TOCD}}
-== Document Resources ==
+== Document Available Resources ==
 If there are any dictionaries or other resources for the language pair, you should make a list of these and (if possible) keep them on hand while you work.  Also useful are resources in a third language you know.  E.g., if you're making an English-Qaraqalpaq MT system, and you can't find any good English-Qaraqalpaq dictionaries, but you know Russian, a Russian-Qaraqalpaq dictionary would be very useful.  Don't be shy to get creative in your use of resources, but be wary of mistakes in various resources (even seemingly reputable ones!) or over-all low-quality resources.
-== Comparative Grammar ==
+== Document Grammatical Differences (Comparative Grammar) ==
 Make a page on this wiki systematically comparing the grammar of the two languages.  This can range from simple differences, such as how plurals are formed or the word order of noun phrases (e.g., Adjective Noun versus Noun Adjective), to high-level differences, such as how passivised relative clauses are formed.  Some good examples of such pages include [[English_and_Esperanto/Outstanding_tests]] and [[Welsh_to_English/Regression_tests]].  Like with these pages, you should probably plan to keep track of which points you've been able to handle (through the implementation of various rules—see below) and which points remain unhandled.
-== Transducers ==
+== Design Transducers ==
 [[User:Firespeaker/Steps for writing a morphological transducer|Write a morphological transducer]] for each language in your pair.  The transducers are the pillars which the pair stands on.  They produce morphological analyses of your forms and generate forms from morphological analyses.  The language pair essentially just maps analyses in one language to analyses in another language, so having good (and similar/compatible) transducers is really important.
@@ Line 15: / Line 17: @@
 === Add some verbs ===
 === Other word classes ===
-== Solving more complicated translation problems ==
+== Solve more complicated translation problems ==
 There are many sorts of translation problems where a simple one-to-one mapping in dix won't work.  This section outlines the various types of problems that arise and how to solve them using Apertium.
@@ Line 43: / Line 45: @@
 Files are apertium-xxx-yyy.xxx-yyy.t*x and apertium-xxx-yyy.yyy-xxx.t*x, where the second language in the file's pair name is the one whose output needs to be controlled.  You can read more about transfer rules at [[A long introduction to transfer rules]].
-== Evaluation ==
+== Evaluate the pair ==
 There are three main ways to evaluate your language pair, each one telling you a different type of strength or weakness: trimmed coverage, WER, and testvoc.  Ideally you should evaluate your pair for all three of these, in both directions (language X → language Y ''and'' language Y → language X).

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 == Transducers ==
-[[User:Firespeaker/Steps for writing a morphological transducer|Write a morphological transducer]] for each language.  At first they can be pretty basic—i.e., you don't have to get through all the steps for each one.
+[[User:Firespeaker/Steps for writing a morphological transducer|Write a morphological transducer]] for each language in your pair.  The transducers are the pillars which the pair stands on.  They produce morphological analyses of your forms and generate forms from morphological analyses.  The language pair essentially just maps analyses in one language to analyses in another language, so having good (and similar/compatible) transducers is really important.
+At first, your transducers can be pretty basic—i.e., you don't have to get through all the steps to create each one.  But you'll want to build it up, testing against corpora, etc.  You want to be able to have as many correct analyses as possible, and generate as many correct forms as possible without overgenerating.  For morphologically complex languages this can be quite a lot of work, but it pays off when you're working on other aspects of the pair and things "just work".
 == Start a bidix ==
 === Map some tags ===

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 == Comparative Grammar ==
+Make a page on this wiki systematically comparing the grammar of the two languages.  This can range from simple differences, such as how plurals are formed or the word order of noun phrases (e.g., Adjective Noun versus Noun Adjective), to high-level differences, such as how passivised relative clauses are formed.  Some good examples of such pages include [[English_and_Esperanto/Outstanding_tests]] and [[Welsh_to_English/Regression_tests]].  Like with these pages, you should keep track of which points you've been able to handle (through the implementation of various rules—see below) and which points remain to handle.
-* e.g., like [[English_and_Esperanto/Outstanding_tests]] or [[Welsh_to_English/Regression_tests]].
 == Transducers ==

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 For trimmed coverage, you'll need at least one corpus of text in your source language (ideally both, if your pair will support translation in both directions).  The corpus or corpora ideally should represent a range of content—i.e., it shouldn't be just sports coverage, economics, or childrens' stories—think about what your user base might want to use your language pair to translate.
+Your pair should have ≥80% trimmed coverage to be considered stable, and ≥90% trimmed coverage to be considered production ready.
 To learn more about trimmed coverage, see [[An introduction to trimmed coverage]].
 === WER ===
-WER (Word Error Rate) tells you what percentage of the words of a text need to be changed before a text is publication-ready.
+WER (Word Error Rate) tells you what percentage of the words of a text need to be changed before a text is production-ready.
 To evaluate WER, you need to choose a text in the source language, run it through your language pair, and make a copy of it where you manually fix all the translation mistakes, rendering the text cleanly and accurately in your target language.  You then use a script to compare the output of the language pair to your cleaned translation.
+Your pair should consistently have around a 10% WER on random texts of sizable length (e.g., 500 words) to be considered production-ready.
 You can learn more about performing [[WER]] evaluation.
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 Testvoc can be done in several ways: you can test just one part of speech (e.g., nouns) to make sure that all forms are translated correctly; you can test a pair based on the entire transducer of one of the languages (as a source langauge), or you can run testvoc on a corpus (for problems that might come up because of [[#Transfer|transfer rules]]).
+Your pair should have an entirely clean testvoc (i.e., all forms are translated without errors) to be considered production-ready.
 You can learn more about [[testvoc]] and how to perform one.