User:Aida/Application

Contact information

Name:Aida Sundetova
E-mail address: sun27aida@gmail.com
Nick on the IRC #apertium channel: Aida
Username at sourceforge: aida27

Why is it you are interested in machine translation?

I have started to learn machine translation in 2012 when I joined to a project, which included developing machine translation from English to Kazakh. Before it I was really interested in artificial intelligence and automation of processes. I continued developing English-Kazakh machine translation on Apertium and tried to know more about Apertium free/open-source machine translation platform. Knowledge of the languages, programming and my target to do translation better helped me to learn XML and improve my working skills.

Why is it that they are interested in the Apertium project?

At the first, Apertium is free/open-source machine translation platform, which means that developers from other countries like me can join and start to do translations for new language pair. Apertium uses Unix “pipelines” which are very useful for fast diagnosis and debugging, so I can use additional modules between existing modules, like using HFST(Helsinki finite-state transducer) for morphological analysis and generation for Kazakh language.

Which of the published tasks are you interested in? What do you plan to do?

I plan to improve English-Kazakh language pair to reach a good translation quality. I have already developed this pair, but it doesn't have corpora and enough vocabulary to show the adequate translation. My target is to make vocabulary coverage bigger than now by using corpora from news and wikipedia and come close to working translator.

Title

Adopting unreleased English-Kazakh language pair

Reasons why Google and Apertium should sponsor it

English to Kazakh machine translation is very important, because Kazakh is Turkic language, so transfer, constraint grammar rules, which I write for this pair can be useful for developing another English – Turkic Language pairs.

How and who it will benefit in society

Kazakh speakers, about 16 millions, can use English-Kazakh translation for understanding English texts: news, papers, etc. Also, as part of this work is Kazakh-English language pair will be improved by increasing a bilingual dictionary, so English speakers would use this translator to understand texts in Kazakh.

List your skills and give evidence of your qualifications

I have developed a English to Kazakh machine translation on Apertium since 2012 and Kazakh to English since 2013. I have great experience in writing and correcting transfer rules, lexical selection and constraint grammar rules, also adding vocabulary in monolingual and bilingual dictionaries. I am a 4-year bachelor student in Kazakh National University(Kazakhstan,Almaty), my major is Information Systems and I will graduate in summer 2014. I know programming languages: C, C++, C#, HTML, XML, and I have basic knowledge of PHP. In addition, I can work with databases and know SQL. My mother language is Kazakh and I also speak English and Russian.

List any non-Summer-of-Code plans you have for the Summer

Before 20 of June I have final exams, but I will have about 3 hours a day to work on project. After graduating from the university I will be free and I can spend 30 hours a week on Apertium.

My plan

Major goals

I plan to work more on vocabulary, and add transfer rules if needed, to be more precise, I plan to reach:

• Good WER
• Clean testvoc
• ~10000 stems in bidix (~600 stems per week, or ~100 per day)
• Additional rules:transfer, lexical, constraint grammar(~10 per week,or ~2 per day)

Schedule

Timeline

See GSoC 2014 Timeline for complete timeline. Important coding dates follow:

• April 22nd: begin working on project
• June 27th - August 17th: midterm evaluations
• August 18th: 'pencils down' date
• August 22th: final evaluation

Workplan

week	dates	goals	notes
post-application period 23 March - 17 April		finish coding challenge with WER ~55% total 3660 stems in dix	Demonstrated ability to add stems to dix and lexc. A couple easy lexical selection rules are still not written. Needs for transfer rules in eng-kaz.t1x
17 April - 1 June		run first testvoc get first frequency lists write ≥4 lexical selection rules write ≥3 transfer rules write ≥4 disambiguation rules note: should be in IRC every day	demonstrated ability to work with lexical selection rules Needs for lexical rules in eng-kaz.lrx got only some experience with coverage scripts
1	1 - 22 June	total 4500 stems in dix adding unknown words <postadv> <ij> <adv> adding transfer rules 500-word evaluation, WER ~52%	demonstrated ability to work with constraint grammar rules and disambiguating Needs for CG rules in eng-kaz.rlx
2	23 - 29 June	total 5100 stems in dix adding unknown words <num> <post> <prn> <det> adding transfer rules	demonstrated ability to work with transfer rules and chunking Needs for transfer rules in eng-kaz.t1x
3	30 - 6 July	total 5700 stems in dix adding unknown words <cnjcoo> <cnjadv> <cnjsub> adding transfer rules	demonstrated ability to work with transfer rules and chunking Needs for transfer rules in eng-kaz.t1x
4	7 - 13 July	total 6300 stems in dix adding unknown words <adj> <n> <np> adding transfer rules	demonstrated ability to work with transfer rules Needs for transfer rules in eng-kaz.t2x
5	14 - 20 July	total 6900 stems in dix clean testvoc for # adding transfer rules	demonstrated ability to work with transfer rules Needs for transfer rules in eng-kaz.t2x
6	21 - 27 July	total 7300 stems in dix correcting tags and clean testvoc for # adding transfer rules	Needs for "cleaning" tags rules in eng-kaz.t4x
7	28 - 3 August	total 7900 stems in dix adding transfer rules	Needs for transfer rules in eng-kaz.t1x Needs for transfer rules in eng-kaz.t4x
8	4 - 10 August	total 8500 stems in dix correcting tags and clean testvoc for # adding transfer rules	Needs for transfer rules in eng-kaz.t1x Needs for transfer rules in eng-kaz.t2x
9	11 - 17 August	total 9100 stems in dix adding transfer rules	Needs for transfer rules in eng-kaz.t2x
10	18 - 22 August	total 9700 stems in dix finish with WER ~50% adding transfer rules	Finishing documentation