Ideas for Google Summer of Code

This is the ideas page for Google Summer of Code, here you can find ideas on interesting projects that would make Apertium more useful for people and improve or expand our functionality. If you have an idea please add it below, if you think you could mentor someone in a particular area, add your name to "Interested mentors" using ~~~

The page is intended as an overview of the kind of projects we have in mind. If one of them particularly piques your interest, please come and discuss with us on #apertium on irc.freenode.net, mail the mailing list, or draw attention to yourself in some other way.

Note that, if you have an idea that isn't mentioned here, we would be very interested to hear about it.

Here are some more things you could look at:

• Top tips for GSOC applications
• Get in contact with one of our long-serving mentors — they are nice, honest!
• Pages in the development category
• Resources that could be converted or expanded in the incubator. Consider doing or improving a language pair (see incubator, nursery and staging for pairs that need work)
• Unhammer's wishlist
• The open bugs page on Bugzilla

List

Adopt a language pair
How ? (required skills)	What ? (description)	Why ? (rationale)	Who ? (mentors)
XML, a scripting language (Python, Perl), good knowledge of the language pair adopted.	Take on an orphaned language pair, and bring it up to release quality results. What this quality will be will depend on the language pair adopted, and will need to be discussed with the prospective mentor. This will involve writing linguistic data (including morphological rules and transfer rules — which are specified in a declarative language — and possibly Constraint Grammar rules if that is relevant)	Apertium has a few pairs of languages (e.g. mt-he, ga-gd, ur-hi, pl-cs, sh-ru, etc...) that are orphaned, they don't have active maintainers. A lot of these pairs have a lot of work already put in, just need another few months to get them to release quality. See also Incubator	Francis Tyers, Jimregan, Kevin Scannell, Trondtr, Unhammer, Darthxaher, Firespeaker, Hectoralos, Hrvoje Peradin
3. Entry level			read more...
Discontiguous multiwords
How ? (required skills)	What ? (description)	Why ? (rationale)	Who ? (mentors)
C++, Knowledge of FSTs	The task will be to develop, or adapt a module to deal with these kind of contiguous multiword expressions, for example, taking 'liggja ekki fyrir' and reordering it as 'liggja# fyrir ekki'.	In many languages, such as English, Norwegian and Icelandic, there are discontiguous multiwords, e.g. phrasal verbs, that we cannot easily support. For example 'liggja ekki fyrir' in Icelandic should be translated in English as 'to be not clear', but we cannot have 'liggja fyrir' as a traditional multiword because of the extra 'adverb', or it could even be a whole NP.	Francis Tyers
2. Medium			read more...
Rule-based finite-state disambiguation
How ? (required skills)	What ? (description)	Why ? (rationale)	Who ? (mentors)
XML, C++ or Java	Implement a disambiguation framework for Apertium that can be expressed as a finite-state transducer. It might be a good idea to express this as constraint rules, in a novel XML-based file format. It would be a good idea to look at LanguageTool, and IceParser and Apertium's own apertium-lex-tools to get ideas on how this might be accomplished.	Currently Apertium only has a bigram/trigram part-of-speech tagger. For most languages, bigram/trigram POS disambiguation really doesn't work, especially when you want to disambiguate morphology (e.g. number, case) along with part-of-speech. So far we've been using constraint grammar for some of these languages. But although Constraint Grammar is great and powerful, it is also pretty slow.	Francis Tyers (C++), Jacob Nordfalk (Java)
1. Hard			read more...
Flag diacritics in lttoolbox
How ? (required skills)	What ? (description)	Why ? (rationale)	Who ? (mentors)
C++ or Java, XML, Knowledge of FSTs	Adapt lttoolbox to elegantly use flag diacritics. Flag diacritics are a way of avoiding transducer size blow-up by discarding impossible paths at runtime as opposed to compile time. Some work have already been done, see Flag diacritics.	This will involve designing some changes to our XML dictionary format (see lttoolbox, and implementing the associated changes in the FST compiling processing code. The reason behind this is that many languages have prefix inflection, and we cannot currently deal with this without either making paradigms useless, or overanalysing (e.g. returning analyses where none exist). Flag diacritics (or constraints) would allow us to restrict overanalysis without blowing up the size of our dictionaries.	Francis Tyers (C++), Jacob Nordfalk (Java)
1. Hard			read more...
Complex multiwords
How ? (required skills)	What ? (description)	Why ? (rationale)	Who ? (mentors)
Java or C++, XML, Knowledge of FSTs	Write a bidirectional module for specifying complex multiword units, for example dirección general and zračna luka. See Multiwords for more information.	Although in the Romance languages it is not a big problem, as soon as you start to get to languages with cases (e.g. Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, German, etc.) the problem comes that you can't define a multiword of adj nom because the adjective has a lot of inflection.	Jimregan
1. Hard			read more...
Optimise the VM for transfer
How ? (required skills)	What ? (description)	Why ? (rationale)	Who ? (mentors)
Python, C++, XML, code optimisation, JIT techniques, etc.	The current VM for the transfer architecture of Apertium is up to five times slower than the XML tree-walking implementation. The job of this task is to optimise the C++ code to make it faster than XML tree-walking.	The rationale behind this is that XML tree-walking is quite slow and CPU intensive. In modern (3 or more stage) pairs, transfer takes up most of the CPU. There are other options, like Bytecode for transfer, but we would like something that does not require external libraries and is adapted specifically for Apertium.	Sortiz
2. Medium			read more...
Accent and diacritic restoration
How ? (required skills)	What ? (description)	Why ? (rationale)	Who ? (mentors)
C, C++, XML, familiarity with linguistic issues, knowledge of FSTs preferable	Create an optional module to restore diacritics and accents on input text, and integrate it into the Apertium pipeline.	Many languages use diacritics and accents in normal writing, and Apertium is designed to use these, however in some places, especially for example. instant messaging, irc, searching in the web etc. these are often not used or untyped. This causes problems as for the engine, traduccion is not the same as traducción.	Kevin Scannell, Trondtr
3. Entry level			read more...
Geriaoueg vocabulary assistant
How ? (required skills)	What ? (description)	Why ? (rationale)	Who ? (mentors)
PHP, C++, XML	Extend Geriaoueg so that it works more reliably with broken HTML, with any given language pair (e.g. support for both lttoolbox and HFST.	Geriaoueg is a program that provides "popup" vocabulary assistance, something like BBC Vocab or Lingro. Currently it only works with Breton--French, Welsh--English and Spanish--Breton. This task would be to develop it to work with any language in our SVN and fix problems with processing and displaying non-standard HTML.	Francis Tyers
3. Entry level			read more...
Closer integration with HFST
How ? (required skills)	What ? (description)	Why ? (rationale)	Who ? (mentors)
C++, Autotools, XML	This is a set of subtasks to make it easier for Apertium developers to use the Helsinki Finite-State Toolkit (HFST). It will involve: Adjusting the HFST build process to allow for an Apertium-tailored install. Making an XML format for lexc designed with machine translation in mind. Adjusting the tokenisation code in hfst-proc. Making lttoolbox a possible backend for HFST.	HFST is a great toolkit for working with morphological transducers, but it is pretty difficult to install, and also not very well integrated with Apertium / doesn't really follow the Apertium way of doing things. We'd like to make it more closely integrated.	Francis Tyers, Tommi A Pirinen
2. Medium			read more...
Corpus-based lexicalised feature transfer
How ? (required skills)	What ? (description)	Why ? (rationale)	Who ? (mentors)
C++, NLP	Make a module that sits somewhere in the Apertium pipeline (somewhere after the lexical selection and before morphological generation) that sets features (eg. tags) based on a model generated from a corpus.	Let's get down to brass tacks, sometimes we get really inadequate translations even though you'd never hear stuff like that. One of those things is when we output something as definite when it is never used as definite. One way of dealing with this is a lot of rules and lists in transfer, but those are hard to do. So, how about looking at a corpus for information about some features like definiteness, aspect, evidentiality, impersonal/reflexive pronoun use in Romance languages etc.	Francis Tyers, Jimregan
1. Hard			read more...
lint for Apertium
How ? (required skills)	What ? (description)	Why ? (rationale)	Who ? (mentors)
Python, C++, XML, autotools	Make a program which tests Apertium data files for suspicious or unrecommended constructs (likely to be bugs).	Somtimes when several people are working on the same code, things can get repeated, or beginners can make unrecommended changes. A lint tester would help people write standard code for dictionaries and transfer files.	Francis Tyers
2. Medium			read more...
Prototype recursive transfer implementations
How ? (required skills)	What ? (description)	Why ? (rationale)	Who ? (mentors)
Python, XML, linguistics	The purpose of this task would be to create a prototype module to replace the apertium-transfer module(s) which will parse and allow transfer operations on an input.	Currently we have a problem with very distantly related languages that have long-distance constituent reordering, because we can only do finite-state chunking.	Francis Tyers, Sortiz
1. Hard			read more...
Monolingual and bilingual data decoupling
How ? (required skills)	What ? (description)	Why ? (rationale)	Who ? (mentors)
Python, XML, linguistics, autotools	Develop a method (scripts) to allow monolingual and bilingual data in Apertium to be decoupled, leaving each language pair with only the necessary bilingual data.	At the moment, Apertium has a separate module for each language pair. Each pair is self-contained, with a copy of both the monolingual data (e.g. POS tagger probabilities and monolingual dictionaries) and bilingual data (e.g. transfer rules and dictionaries). The method should be tested with es-ca, es-pt and pt-ca. After decoupling, all pairs should pass testvoc.	Francis Tyers, Firespeaker
1. Hard			read more...
Apertium assimilation evaluation toolkit
How ? (required skills)	What ? (description)	Why ? (rationale)	Who ? (mentors)
A scripting language	Starting from files containing sentences in the source language and reference translations, generate tests for human evaluation consisting of: (1) (optionally) the source sentence, (2) (optionally) the machine-translated version of the source sentences and (3) a reference translation of the sentence in which one or more content words have been deleted. The idea is to measure how the ability of human subjects to fill in the holes improves when the source or a machine translation of it are presented. The task involves also generating a program that computes the success as a function of the information presented to the user, and utilities to make the whole process automatic given an Apertium language pair.	Many Apertium language pairs are designed for assimilation (gisting) purposes. The evaluation described would measure how helpful they are in the task.	Francis Tyers, Mikel Forcada
3. Entry level			read more...
Improvements in lexical-selection module
How ? (required skills)	What ? (description)	Why ? (rationale)	Who ? (mentors)
C++, python	Implement a number of improvements to the lexical selection module, particularly involving the rule-learning scripts.	The lexical selection module in Apertium is currently a prototype. There are many optimisations that could be made to make it faster and more efficient. There are a number of scripts which can be used for learning lexical-selection rules, but the scripts are not particularly well written. Part of the task will be to rewrite the scripts taking into account all possible corner cases.	Francis Tyers
2. Medium			read more...
Plain-text formats for Apertium data
How ? (required skills)	What ? (description)	Why ? (rationale)	Who ? (mentors)
XSLT, XML, flex, bison	Apertium data is currently largely encoded in XML-based formats. These are very overt and clear, but clumsy and hard to write. The idea is to make a plain-text format (based on the old MorphoTrans format) and write converters to/from the existing XML based format.	Many of our developers like the XML-based transfer and dictionary formats, but there are always some who would prefer a more texty format. This idea would make them happier. Happy developers write more code!	Mlforcada
2. Medium			read more...
Sliding-window part-of-speech tagger
How ? (required skills)	What ? (description)	Why ? (rationale)	Who ? (mentors)
XML, C++	The idea is to implement the unsupervised part-of-speech tagger as a drop-in replacement for the current hidden-Markov-model tagger. It should have support for unknown words, and also for "forbid" descriptions (not described in the paper).	Currently Apertium only has a bigram/trigram HMM-based part-of-speech tagger. For most languages, bigram/trigram POS disambiguation with unsupervised training doesn't give very good performance. This is even more noticeable when you want to disambiguate morphology (e.g. number, case) along with part-of-speech. So far we've been using constraint grammar for some of these languages. But although Constraint Grammar is great and powerful, it is also pretty slow.	Mlforcada
1. Hard			read more...
Improved bilingual dictionary induction
How ? (required skills)	What ? (description)	Why ? (rationale)	Who ? (mentors)
Python, XML	Write a set of scripts that can generate valid and consistent Apertium bilingual dictionary entries from a word-aligned parallel corpus. This will involve making a basic templating system. The scripts should ideally be able to incorporate quality measures to determine how reliable the translations extracted from the corpus are.	There are some tools to make bilingual dictionaries from parallel corpora (such as retratos) but they don't take into account that words in different languages can require different entries in the bilingual dictionary depending on their morphological characteristics. This means that although finding the translations is automatic, most generated entries have to be checked, which can greatly increase the amount of time it takes to make a new translation system.	Francis Tyers
3. Entry level			read more...
Template-based bilingual dictionary
How ? (required skills)	What ? (description)	Why ? (rationale)	Who ? (mentors)
XML, C++, python	Design a format similar to bidix (declarative XML establishing language 1 <> language 2 correspondences) that allows the use of templates, as well as the back-end to process it (i.e., it should compile into an FST). It should deal with discontiguous multiwords and complex multiwords, allowing them to be easily translated, and should provide some mechanism (some sort of ranking) to deal with multiple matching sets of templates for a given translation (similar to CG). It should essentially allow one to bypass transfer rules and disambiguation and produce similar (if not better) accuracy in translation.	A templatic bidix forces the designer of a language pair to be more explicit, and also consolidates pair development. Furthermore, there are several types of phenomenon such a system could deal with that are currently highly problematic.	Firespeaker Francis Tyers
1. Hard			read more...
Interface for creating tagged corpora
How ? (required skills)	What ? (description)	Why ? (rationale)	Who ? (mentors)
Python, XML	Write an interface, possibly in Python and Gtk+, to allow a user to tag a corpus by hand. It should include support for applying hand-written rules and for training and running the tagger on a given test set.	There is a need in Apertium for both released pairs and new ones: better part-of-speech taggers. Using supervised training has always given a performance boost. But coming across free tagged corpora, let alone free tagged corpora in Apertium format is very hard. There is only one corpus that we know of in Apertium format.	Mlforcada
3. Entry level			read more...