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 issues on Github (or on Sourceforge). The latter are probably out of date now since migrating to Github.

If you're a student trying to propose a topic, the recommended way is to request a wiki account and then go to

http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/User:[[your username]]/GSoC2020Proposal

and click the "create" button near the top of the page. It's also nice to include [[Category:GSoC_2020_student_proposals]] to help organize submitted proposals.

Ideas

Python API for Apertium

• Difficulty:
  2. Medium
• Size: default Unknown size
• Required skills:
  C++, Python
• Description:
  Update the Python API for Apertium to expose all Apertium modes and test with all major OSes
• Rationale:
  The current Python API misses out on a lot of functionality, like phonemicisation, segmentation, and transliteration, and doesn't work for some OSes like Debian.
• Mentors:
  Francis Tyers
• read more...

Web API extensions

• Difficulty:
  2. Medium
• Size: default Unknown size
• Required skills:
  Python
• Description:
  Update the web API for Apertium to expose all Apertium modes
• Rationale:
  The current Web API misses out on a lot of functionality, like phonemicisation, segmentation, and transliteration
• Mentors:
  Francis Tyers, Jonathan Washington
• read more...

Develop a morphological analyser

• Difficulty:
  3. Entry level
• Size: default Unknown size
• Required skills:
  XML
• Description:
  Write a morphological analyser and generator for a language that does not yet have one
• Rationale:
  A key part of an Apertium machine translation system is a morphological analyser and generator. The objective of this task is to create an analyser for a language that does not yet have one.
• Mentors:
  Francis Tyers, Jonathan Washington, Sevilay Bayatlı
• read more...

Support for Enhanced Dependencies in UD Annotatrix

• Difficulty:
  2. Medium
• Size: default Unknown size
• Required skills:
  NodeJS
• Description:
  UD Annotatrix is an annotation interface for Universal Dependencies, but does not yet support all functionality
• Rationale:
  
• Mentors:
  Francis Tyers
• read more...

User-friendly lexical selection training

• Difficulty:
  2. Medium
• Size: default Unknown size
• Required skills:
  Python, C++, shell scripting
• Description:
  Make it so that training/inference of lexical selection rules is a more user-friendly process
• Rationale:
  Our lexical selection module allows for inferring rules from corpora and word alignments, but the procedure is currently a bit messy, with various scripts involved that require lots of manual tweaking, and many third party tools to be installed. The goal of this task is to make the procedure as user-friendly as possible, so that ideally only a simple config file would be needed, and a driver script would take care of the rest.
• Mentors:
  Unhammer, Mikel Forcada
• read more...

Robust tokenisation in lttoolbox

• Difficulty:
  2. Medium
• Size: default Unknown size
• Required skills:
  C++, XML, Python
• Description:
  Improve the longest-match left-to-right tokenisation strategy in lttoolbox to be fully Unicode compliant.
• Rationale:
  One of the most frustrating things about working with Apertium on texts "in the wild" is the way that the tokenisation works. If a letter is not specified in the alphabet, it is dealt with as whitespace, so e.g. you get unknown words split in two so you can end up with stuff like ^G$ö^k$ı^rmak$ which is terrible for further processing.
• Mentors:
  Francis Tyers, Flammie
• read more...

apertium-separable language-pair integration

• Difficulty:
  2. Medium
• Size: default Unknown size
• Required skills:
  XML, a scripting language (Python, Perl), some knowledge of linguistics and/or at least one relevant natural language
• Description:
  Choose a language you can identify as having a good number of "multiwords" in the lexicon. Modify all language pairs in Apertium to use the Apertium-separable module to process the multiwords, and clean up the dictionaries accordingly.
• Rationale:
  Apertium-separable is a newly developed module to process lexical items with discontinguous dependencies, an area where Apertium has traditionally fallen short. Despite all the module has to offer, it has only been put to use in small test cases, and hasn't been integrated into any translation pair's development cycle.
• Mentors:
  Jonathan Washington
• read more...

UD and Apertium integration

• Difficulty:
  3. Entry level
• Size: default Unknown size
• Required skills:
  python, javascript, HTML, (C++)
• Description:
  Create a range of tools for making Apertium compatible with Universal Dependencies
• Rationale:
  Universal dependencies is a fast growing project aimed at creating a unified annotation scheme for treebanks. This includes both part-of-speech and morphological features. Their annotated corpora could be extremely useful for Apertium for training models for translation. In addition, Apertium's rule-based morphological descriptions could be useful for software that relies on Universal dependencies.
• Mentors:
  User:Francis Tyers Jonathan Washington
• read more...

rule visualization tools

• Difficulty:
  2. Medium
• Size: default Unknown size
• Required skills:
  python? javascript? XML
• Description:
  make tools to help visualize the effect of various rules
• Rationale:
  TODO see https://github.com/Jakespringer/dapertium for an example
• Mentors:
  Jonathan Washington
• read more...

dictionary induction from wikis

• Difficulty:
  2. Medium
• Size: default Unknown size
• Required skills:
  MySQL, mediawiki syntax, perl, maybe C++ or Java; Java, Scala, RDF, and DBpedia to use DBpedia extraction
• Description:
  Extract dictionaries from linguistic wikis
• Rationale:
  Wiki dictionaries and encyclopedias (e.g. omegawiki, wiktionary, wikipedia, dbpedia) contain information (e.g. bilingual equivalences, morphological features, conjugations) that could be exploited to speed up the development of dictionaries for Apertium. This task aims at automatically building dictionaries by extracting different pieces of information from wiki structures such as interlingual links, infoboxes and/or from dbpedia RDF datasets.
• Mentors:
  Jonathan Washington
• read more...

unit testing framework

• Difficulty:
  2. Medium
• Size: default Unknown size
• Required skills:
  perl
• Description:
  adapt https://github.com/TinoDidriksen/regtest for general Apertium use and implement
• Rationale:
  We are gradually improving our quality control, with (semi-)automated tests, but these are done on the Wiki on an ad-hoc basis. Having a unified testing framework would allow us to be able to more easily track quality improvements over all language pairs, and more easily deal with regressions.
• Mentors:
  ???
• read more...

spell checker web interface

• Difficulty:
  2. Medium
• Size: default Unknown size
• Required skills:
  html, js, css, python
• Description:
  Add a spell-checking interface to Apertium's web tools
• Rationale:
  Apertium-html-tools has seen some prototypes for spell-checking interfaces (all in stale PRs and branches on GitHub), but none have ended up being quite ready to integrate into the tools. This project would entail polishing up or recreating an interface, and making sure APy has a mode that allows access to Apertium voikospell modules. The end result should be a slick, easy-to-use interface for proofing text, with intuitive underlining of text deemed to be misspelled and intuitive presentation and selection of alternatives.
• Mentors:
  Jonathan Washington
• read more...

Bring an unreleased translation pair to releasable quality

• Difficulty:
  2. Medium
• Size: default Unknown size
• Required skills:
  shell scripting
• Description:
  Take an unstable language pair and improve its quality, focusing on testvoc
• Rationale:
  Many Apertium language pairs have large dictionaries and have otherwise seen much development, but are not of releasable quality. The point of this project would be bring one translation pair to releasable quality. This would entail obtaining good naïve coverage and a clean testvoc.
• Mentors:
  Jonathan Washington
• read more...

Develop a prototype MT system for a strategic language pair

• Difficulty:
  2. Medium
• Size: default Unknown size
• Required skills:
  XML, some knowledge of linguistics and of one relevant natural language
• Description:
  Create a translation pair based on two existing language modules, focusing on the dictionary and structural transfer
• Rationale:
  Choose a strategic set of languages to develop an MT system for, such that you know the target language well and morphological transducers for each language are part of Apertium. Develop an Apertium MT system by focusing on writing a bilingual dictionary and structural transfer rules. Expanding the transducers and disambiguation, and writing lexical selection rules and multiword sequences may also be part of the work. The pair may be an existing prototype, but if it's a heavily developed but unreleased pair, consider applying for "Bring an unreleased translation pair to releasable quality" instead.
• Mentors:
  Jonathan Washington
• read more...

Website Improvements

• Difficulty:
  2. Medium
• Size: default Unknown size
• Required skills:
  html, css, js, python
• Description:
  Improve elements of Apertium's web infrastructure
• Rationale:
  Apertium's website infrastructure Apertium-html-tools and its supporting API Apertium APy have numerous open issues, including half-completed features, like dictionary lookup. This project would entail choosing a subset of open issues and features that could realistically be completed in the summer. You're encouraged to speak with the Apertium community to see which features and issues are the most pressing.
• Mentors:
  Jonathan Washington
• read more...

Apertium Browser Plugin

• Difficulty:
  2. Medium
• Size: default Unknown size
• Required skills:
  html, css, js, python
• Description:
  Expand functionality of Geriaoueg vocabulary assistant
• Rationale:
  Geriaoueg is a vocabulary assistant with Firefox/Chrom[e/ium] plugins. These plugins interface with Apertium's web API, Apertium APy, and allow a user to look up (in Apertium's dictionaries) word forms from a web page they're viewing. A Firefox/Chrom[e/ium] plugin should also be able to provide in-browser website translation. This project is to clean up the dictionary lookup functionality and add translation support to the plugins. Some APy features may need to be tweaked, but most of the work in this project will be solely in the plugins.
• Mentors:
  Jonathan Washington
• read more...