Difference between revisions of "User:Arghya1998"

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=== <center> GSoC Proposal : Python API/library for Apertium </center> ===

== Basic Details ==


{| class="wikitable" style="width:100%"
| Name
| Arghya Bhattacharya
|-
| Email Address
| arghya.b@research.iit.ac.in
|-
| Alternate Email Address
| arghyatiger@gmail.com
|-
| IRC Nick
| arghya[m]
|-
| Mobile
| +91 9831325363
|-
| TimeZone
| UTC + 5:30
|-
| Link to Gihub
| https://github.com/arghyatiger
|-
| Link to Gitlab
| https://gitlab.com/arghyatiger
|}

== Why am I interested in Machine Translation? ==

'''The broader perspective:'''

Being from a diverse country like India, with over 22 officially registered languages and over 1500 mother tongue languages (150 of them are sizeable), I&rsquo;ve always been curious as to how
languages serve as the basic entity of communication. During my childhood, I have lived in various places in India and hence I have had the chance to closely interact with people of different lingual backgrounds and in the process I ended up learning quite a few languages including Hindi, Bengali, English, Tamil, Oriya. The language diversity in my country is fascinating, but with it comes a lot of problems in communication and I believe that efficient machine translation can aid a lot of these problems and breaking the &ldquo;language barrier&rdquo; across not just the country and the globe and connect people better.


'''Academic Interests:'''

I am currently pursuing my B.Tech in Computer Science + M.S by Research in Computational Linguistics Dual Degree program at IIIT-Hyderabad, India. A good portion of our academic focus is on Machine Translation and I find it a really interesting area to work on. So working with apertium will help me nurture my Computational Linguistics skills as well as give me a chance to give back to the community with some solid contribution.



== Why is it that I am interested in Apertium? ==

Being a student, with primary academic focus on Computational Linguistics, Apertium happens to be one of the important tools that I use for my university assignments.The Apertium projects provide a nice blend of linguistic and coding tasks and that makes the projects interesting to me. Also as a part of the long-term goal of contributing to the community, I think contributions to Apertium would make a significant impact on the Computational Linguistics community all around the globe and that further motivates me to work for Apertium



== Which of the published tasks am I interested in? ==

To me, all the published tasks seem to be interesting and hence it was difficult to choose only one. But I have been able to narrow down to the project which I like the most. It is called Python API/library for Apertium



== Why should Google and Apertium sponsor the project of Python API for Apertium? ==

The Apertium code base is primarily written in C++. While C++ has a fairly high performance, supports low-level systems programming and is fairly available everywhere and reasonably well standardized, however, there are a few shortcomings to it as well. Some of them include the non-interactiveness of C++, the compile/debug/nap cycle and the endless difficulties in extending and modifying the modules. Also, Once the development of a module is done with, certain improvements like writing User-Interfaces and systems integration become really cumbersome in C++. Python, on the other hand, has a lot of features that c++ doesn&rsquo;t have. Python has an interpreted high-level programming environment. And hence a python wrapper can provide flexibility, interactivity to Apertium&rsquo;s code base. Also a lot of other features like ease of debugging, ease of testing, and rapid prototyping.



== How and Who will benefit from this project? ==

The project would bring a lot of developers at ease as python is a high-level language with a lot of features that make it easier to grasp for developers, and would increase the scalability of apertium in the future, also a lot of people like to use jupyter notebooks and python, and hence I believe that if apertium has a python API, it would be helpful to a large community of developers, linguists, computational linguistics and all people keen on using a wide range of linguistic tools.



== Detailed project plan and workflow ==

'''1. Detailed Project Goal:'''

The Goal of the project is to create structured python wrappers for the core modules of apertium, namely:

* [[Apertium/Lttoolbox]]
* [[Apertium/Apertium]]

a.) The modules should be python importable, the pythonic usage would be as follows:
from apertium.lttoolbox import transducer
b.) The modules should be nested
apertium.lttoolbox.transducer
c.) The internal usage of the functions should be as follows:
import apertium.transducer.internal
t = apertium.transducer.internal.Transducer().insertSingleTransduction()

'''2. Tool to be used: '''

For the project, I plan on using SWIG to bind the C++ code. SWIG is a software development tool that simplifies the task of interfacing different languages to C and C++ programs. SWIG is a compiler that takes C declarations and creates the wrappers needed to access those declarations from other languages. Among the other options that I explored for the project are Pyrex, ctypes, SIP, Boost.python.But for projects of the scale of this one, SWIG seems to be the most convenient due to a lot of features explained later in the proposal.

'''3. Timeline :'''

Goals for the various phases:
{| class="wikitable" style="width:100%"
! PHASE
! OBJECTIVE OF PHASE
|- style="background-color:#d2f7b2;"
| Community Bonding Period
|
* Good Understanding of all the modules, all the intricacies of binding each module and a detailed report of the modules
|- style="background-color:#ccd3ff;"
| Phase 1
|
* Binding/Testing the Lttoolbox Module
|- style="background-color:#f2c1f2;"
| Phase 2
|
* Binding/Testing the Apertium Module
|- style="background-color:#f9c7d0;"
| Phase 3
|
* Documentation of usage of the python modules and library organization of the modules made in previous phases
|}


Week-Wise Goals:

{| class="wikitable"
! NAME OF PHASE
! DURATION
! DETAILS OF PHASE TASKS
|-style="background-color:#d2f7b2;"
| COMMUNITY BONDING PERIOD
|
* START: April 23rd
* END: May 13th
|
* Playing around with the lttoolbox and apertium modules and using every function and understanding all the flags and arguments of the functions.
* Reading up on the details of SWIG.Taking inputs from various apertium users on what would be the ideal implementation that they would want.
|- style="background-color:#ccd3ff;"
| WEEK 1
|
* START: May 14th
* END: May 20th
|
* Setting up Disutils for the lttoolbox module and making the basic layout importable in Python.
|- style="background-color:#ccd3ff;"
| WEEK 2
|
* START: May 21st
* END: May 27th
|
* Making explicit declarations of Constants and Enumerations of the module in SWIG interface
* Testing all pointer-based data manipulation for any errors. (A common problem that might occur with swig bindings)
* Looking for Data Members that need to be made read-only and making necessary changes in the interface file
* Identifying Static Class members, Python classes had no support for static methods and no version of Python supports static member variables in a manner that SWIG can utilize. Therefore, SWIG generates wrappers that try to work around some of these issues, but the other issues have to be taken care of manually.
* Resolving namespace problem of SWIG manually(occurs if there are multiple namespaces)
|- style="background-color:#ccd3ff;"
| WEEK 3
|
* START: May 28th
* END: June 3rd
|
* In order to create wrappers, one has to tell SWIG to create wrappers for a particular template instantiation. Hence all the templates have to be explicitly declared specific to the data being manipulated in them.
* C++ Reference Counted Objects: Referencing and Dereferencing of objects have to be taken care of so that no error occurs, another place where SWIG isn’t smart enough.
* Handling C++ overloaded functions: Overloading support is not quite as flexible as in C++. Sometimes there are methods that SWIG can't disambiguate if such errors appear then they have to be taken care of manually in the interface file of the wrapper.
|- style="background-color:#ccd3ff;"
| WEEK 4
|
* START : June 4th
* END: June 10th
|
* Implement Director Classes, No mechanism exists to pass method calls down the inheritance chain from C++ to Python. In particular, if a C++ class has been extended in Python, these extensions will not be visible from C++ code. Virtual method calls from C++ are thus not able to access the lowest implementation in the inheritance chain. There exists a feature implemented in SWIG called directors, The job of the directors is to route method calls correctly, either to C++ implementations higher in the inheritance chain or to Python implementations lower in the inheritance chain.
* Writing c++ helper functions: Sometimes the SWIG module misses bits of functionality because there is no easy way to construct and manipulate a suitable datatype, for those cases c++ helper functions need to be written.
* Writing High-Level Python function to provide a high-level Python interface built on top of low-level helper functions.
* Error Handling: If C++ throws an error, then it is better to convert it into a python exception.
|-style="background-color:#f2c1f2;"
| WEEK 5
|
* START: June 11th
* END: June 17th
|
* Ref Week 1
|-style="background-color:#f2c1f2;"
| WEEK 6
|
* START: June 18th
* END: June 24th
|
* Ref Week 2
|-style="background-color:#f2c1f2;"
| WEEK 7
|
* START: June 25th
* END: July 1st
|
* Ref Week 3
|-style="background-color:#f2c1f2;"
| WEEK 8
|
* START: July 2nd
* END: July 8th
|
* Ref Week 4
|- style="background-color:#f9c7d0;"
| WEEK 9
|
* START: July 9th
* END: July 15th
|
* Testing the modules built and starting the documentation.
|- style="background-color:#f9c7d0;"
| WEEK 10
|
* START: July 16th
* END: July 22nd
|
* Finishing the documentation of the module and distribute for Beta testing
|- style="background-color:#f9c7d0;"
| WEEK 11
|
* START: July 23rd
* END: July 29th
|
* Taking reviews of beta testing and implementing changes if any.
|- style="background-color:#f9c7d0;"
| WEEK 12
|
* START: July 30th
* END: August 5th
|
* Making the super wrapper for the modules
* Making the module pip installable
* Update Documentation
|- style="background-color:#f9c7d0;"
| WEEK 13
|
* START : August 6th
* END: August 14th
|
* Analyse and make bug report for the bugs in the code.
* Make Final documentation
* Release Final Module
|}

== Coding Challenge ==

1.)Make the Transducer model python importable



== About me: Education and Experience ==

I am a sophomore at IIIT-Hyderabad, India, pursuing my Dual-Degree in Computer Science and Computational Linguistics. I&rsquo;ve worked with C++ and Python closely in a lot of projects and I take keen interest in machine learning as well.I usually love building fun applications. The details of my work experience can be found [[here]].

</span>

[[Category:GSoC_2018_student_proposals]]

Latest revision as of 09:19, 27 March 2018

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