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.

Improve interoperability

Difficulty

Medium

Task

Either to modify Apertium to accept different formats, to modify the other tools to accept the Apertium format, or alternatively write some kind of generic "glue" code that converts between them.

Rationale

There is a lot of great free software that could be used with the Apertium engine. For example the Stuttgart FST (SFST) tools for morphological analysis/generation could be used in place of lttoolbox, and the constraint grammars from VISL could be used in place of apertium-tagger. Unfortunately these, along with many other tools have incompatible input/output formats.

Programming requirements

Knowledge of C, C++, XML

Linguistic requirements

None really, but anything is better than nothing.

Further reading

Accent and diacritic restoration

Difficulty

Medium

Task

Create an optional module to restore diacritics and accents on incoming text.

Rationale

Many languages use diacritics and accents in normal writing, and Apertium is designed to use these, however in some places, especially for example. instant messaging, irc etc. these are often not used or untyped. This causes problems as for the engine, traduccion is not the same as traducción.

Programming requirements

Knowledge of C, C++, XML

Linguistic requirements

Be familiar with the issues surrounding accents and diacritics.

Further reading

Porting

Difficulty

Medium

Task

Port Apertium to Windows and Mac OS/X complete with nice installers and all that jazz. Apertium currently compiles on Windows (see Apertium on Windows), but we'd like to see it compile with a free toolchain.

Rationale

While we all might use GNU/Linux, there are a lot of people out there who don't, some of them use Microsoft's Windows, others use Mac OS. It would be nice for these people to use Apertium too.

Programming requirements

C++, experience in programming on Windows

Linguistic requirements

None.

Further reading

Lexical selection

Difficulty

Hard

Task

Rationale

Programming requirements

Linguistic requirements

Further reading

Interfaces

Difficulty

Low

Task

Create plugins or extensions for popular free software applications to include support for translation using Apertium. We'd expect at least OpenOffice and Firefox, but to start with something more easy we have half-finished plugins for Gaim and XChat that could use some love. The more the better!

Rationale

Apertium currently runs as a stand alone translator. It would be great if it was integrated in other free software applications. For example so instead of copy/pasting text out of your email, you could just click a button and have it translated in place.

Programming requirements

Depends on the application chosen, but probably C, C++, Python or Perl.

Linguistic requirements

None.

Further reading