Google Summer of Code/Application 2008

Notes for applicants here: selection criteria, and advice for mentors

Answers to the descriptive questions should probably be 2--3 paragraphs at most, according to advice from #gsoc.

Fill out the application form here.

Application

Describe your organization.

• Two organizations team up for GSoC. One is the Transducens research group [[1]] of the Universitat d'Alacant [[2]] (Alacant, Spain); the other one is Prompsit Language Engineering [[3]]. These two organizations are currently responsible for most of the development taking place in the Apertium open-source machine translation platform [[4]].

Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2008? What do you hope to gain by participating?

• Both organizations are very interested in seeing Apertium improve in many different directions. The Universitat, mainly because most of its research in the field of machine translation is based on Apertium components. Prompsit, because it bases its business in providing Apertium-based services.

Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.

• n/a

If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?

• n/a

Who will your organization administrator be? Please include Google Account information.

• Mikel L. Forcada (Grup Transducens, Universitat d'Alacant, <mikel.forcada at gmail.com>

What license(s) does your project use?

• GNU GPL 2.0

What is the URL for your ideas page?

• http://xixona.dlsi.ua.es/wiki/index.php/Ideas_for_Google_Summer_of_Code

What is the main development mailing list or forum for your organization?

• apertium-stuff@lists.sourceforge.net

What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

• #apertium on irc.freenode.net

Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.

• We are preparing one, along these lines:

• What's your name and e-mail address?
• What is your current education?
• Have you programmed before in an open-source project?
• Why is it that you are interested in machine translation?
• Why is it that you are interested in the apertium project?
• Which task are you interested in, and why?

Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please include Google Account information.

• Gema Ramírez Sánchez (Prompsit Language Engineering S.L., <g.ramirez at gmail.com>

Who will your mentors be? Please include Google Account information.

• Francis Tyers <francis.tyers at gmail.com>
• Mikel L. Forcada <mikel.forcada at gmail.com>
• Jimmy O'Regan <joregan at gmail.com>
• Felipe Sánchez Martínez <fsanchez at gmail.com>
• Sergio Ortiz Rojas <sergio.ortiz at gmail.com>
• Wynand Winterbach <????>

What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

• They are all developers at the Apertium project:

• Francis Tyers is one of the main coordinators of development being done outside the Universitat d'Alacant or Prompsit. He is a graduate student at the Universitat d'Alacant and works for Prompsit Language Engineering. He has been responsible for the current visibility of Apertium in Debian and Ubuntu, has set up the Apertium wiki, takes care of the #apertium IRC channel, etc.

• Mikel L. Forcada is a Professor of Computer Science and has led all of the research that has been done at the Universitat d'Alacant in the field of machine translation. He is responsible for much of the current design of Apertium.

• Jimmy O'Regan [...]

• Felipe Sánchez Martínez is a graduate student at the Universitat d'Alacant under the supervision of Mikel L. Forcada. He is responsible for coding the part-of-speech tagger of Apertium as well as the maintainer of packages apertium-tagger-training-tools and apertium-transfer-tools, which allow developers of Apertium language-pair data to induce the part-of-speech tagger and an initial set of translation rules from monolingual and bilingual corpora.

• Sergio Ortiz-Rojas is the senior programmer at Prompsit Language Engineering and is responsible for most of the code in Apertium (except the one written by Felipe Sánchez Martínez); he is, therefore, the developer of reference when it comes to develop new code for the platform.

• Wynand Winterbach [...]

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

If a mentor reports the disappearance of a student (48-hour silence), he will be contacted by the administrators. If silence persists, his task will be frozen and we will report Google.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

It is quite unlikely, since all of the mentors are very active developers.

If a mentor fails to respond adequately to a student, he or she will have been instructed to contact the administrators. The administrators will examine the situation; if disappearance (48 hour silence) is confirmed, they will assign a different mentor to them, and inform Google.

What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?

• We will make sure most developers are available as long as possible at the #apertium IRC channel, so that they get guidance with any problem they may have during development or before taking decisions on what task to select.
• We will try to get them involved as early as possible in the project, by granting them developer status, so they can modify code and data as any other developer would.

What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?

• Whenever there is a relevant research or development component in their work, we will make sure they can use it as part of their undergraduate or graduate work, and offer some guidance when writing papers.