User:Mathematic-alpha/gsoc-report

PROJECT: Adopt an unreleased language pair with a minimal user interface.

STATS and REPOs

Medumba progress
Date	byv lexicon size	Corpus size	Coverage
12.06.2019	189	8674	~0.37
20.06.2019	317	8674	~0.39
05.07.2019	317	8674	~0.56
10.07.2019	1186	6604	~0.83
2019-07-21	1703	22627	~65.21%
2019-07-25	1705	22637	~69.19%
2019-07-25	17594	22624	~77.77%
2019-08-05	27896 (???)	35035 (??? )	~79.62%
2019-08-21	12245	14823	~90.01% (w/o bible text)
2019-08-26	22517	19223	~85.37% (w/ bible text)

Medumba-French progress
Date	byv-fra lexicon size	Coverage	WER, PER
12.06.2019	1592	~0.10	Something
05.07.2019	1592	~0.20	Something
10.07.2019	1592	~0.35	Something

Monodix (Apertium-byv)
-My commits

Bidix (Apertium-byv-fra)
-My commits

Interface

Project description

A project on the adoption of Medumba-Français language pair in Apertium had as its purpose creation of machine translation system between Medumba and Français languages. As Medumba is one of the low-resource languages of the world the translation system is unlikely to be developed by other methods than Rule-Based Machine Translation. As the evidence of that, we had only about 12 texts from Wikipedia incubator (links in Manifest) and quasi inexistent Medumba-Français aligned text sources as a source.

Generally, the project consisted of three main parts:

• Morphological analyzer for Medumba
• Medumba-Français bilingual dictionary (bidix)
• Transfer rules

A detailed work plan for the project can be found here.

Morphological Analyzer

We had to develop morphological analyzer almost from scratch. And the most challenging thing from the beginning was to find any properly organized lists of words or Medumba dictionaries and even online corpus. By the end of the Community Bonding period after 2 weeks of work, we were able to analyze less than 20% of words contained in wiki corpora. Coverage almost 90% by the end of Google Summer of Code program (if not of the bible text which is written in the old orthography).

The morphological analyzer is accompanied by spellrelax file with rules for transcribing the old orthography to the new one.

Bilingual Dictionary

The development of the bidix(bilingual dictionary) was halted for the benefit of the morphological analyser for the Mə̀dʉ̂mbɑ̀. This is so because to have a good bilingual dictionary, both monolingual dictionaries must work fine.

Transfer rules

We cannot reproduce correctly the structure of the Français sentence as well as word forms with right Français inflexions as we still have few transfer rules. Transfer rules are developed only for very few nouns so far but we are planning to do it in the nearest future.

Plans for future

1. Increase coverage as much as possible ;
2. Write transfer rules ;
3. Develop the interface ;

The community in charge of the development of Medumba(or any Cameroonian language committee) are not really versed with the techniques to develop a complete dictionary. The main aim is to provide some sort of abstraction built over GitHub with a combination of CI tools and virtual machines to automate the build

Acknowledgements and impressions of GSoC program

First of all, I would like to express my total gratitude to Anastasia Kuznetsova, mentor, who has always been very helpful and supportive (really). In the course of the GSoC program, she helped me when I was stuck and she was always available. She is really helpful. I also thank Jonathan Washington, mentor, who put in all his efforts to make this project a success. Hopefully, this project will motivate others and turn into larger community work.