User:Francis Tyers/Apertium 4

Wish list for Apertium 4:

Software engineering

• Make the different parts of the engine code more coherent in terms of modules
• Better test coverage and testing of existing (particularly newer) modules

Linguistic data

• Extract multiwords from lexicons into "separable" FSTs
• Train taggers for all languages using available corpora and a TLM
• At least one state-of-the-art language pair (wrt. Google).

Engine

• Better support for Unicode in lttoolbox.
• Use embeddings for morphological disambiguation and lexical selection
• Pass the surface form until transfer (to allow modules to look up surface form embeddings)
• Retire the HMM tagger
• Be able to train weights for morph analysis + morph. disambiguation + lexical selection + transfer end to end.
  • e.g. can we treat the modules of the pipeline as a neural net and train the weights for them via backprop?
• Fully functional recursive transfer
• Per session state, this could be stored in something like a special blank that could be updated. It might contain things like domain, etc.

Neural system

• apertium-neural: There should be a basic NMT implementation that functions in the Apertium ecosystem (C++,autotools,bash,apy,html-tools) for communities that want to build their own NMT systems and still take advantage of our ecosystem. We should be a one-stop shop for MT for marginalised langs.

End user

• Format handling
• user-based chunking: Better treatment of "no-translate"
• User dictionaries
• Better handling of code-switching/mixed texts and informal text.