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 -- or just have interests or ideas for that, add your name to "Interested parties" using ~~~

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

Interested parties

Francis Tyers

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

• Simard, Michel (1998). "Automatic Insertion of Accents in French Texts". Proceedings of EMNLP-3. Granada, Spain.
• Rada F. Mihalcea. (2002). "Diacritics Restoration: Learning from Letters versus Learning from Words". Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2276/2002 pp. 96--113
• "G. De Pauw, P. W. Wagacha; G.M. de Schryver (2007) "Automatic diacritic restoration for resource-scarce languages". Proceedings of Text, Speech and Dialogue, Tenth International Conference. pp. 170--179

Interested parties

Francis Tyers

Handling of texts without accents or diacritics

Difficulty

Medium

Task

Modify the linguistic data in an Apertium language-pair package so that it can accept text without accents or diacritics (or partially diacriticized). No programming expected. Just dictionary modification and retraining. The task may constitute an alternative solution to the problem in the previous task.

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

Perhaps some scripting to automate dictionary transformations and training runs.

Linguistic requirements

Be familiar with the issues surrounding accents and diacritics.

Further reading

Interested parties

Mlforcada

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

Interested parties

Francis Tyers

Lexical selection

Difficulty

Hard

Task

Rationale

Programming requirements

Linguistic requirements

Further reading

• Ide, N. and Véronis, J. (1998) "Word Sense Disambiguation: The State of the Art". Computational Linguistics 24(1)

Interested parties

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

Interested parties

Francis Tyers

Replacement for Apertium part-of-speech tagger based on sliding-windows

Difficulty

Hard

Task

Writing a complete drop-in replacement for the Apertium part-of-speech tagger based on the sliding-window part-of-speech tagger of Sánchez-Villamil et al. (2004) [1] and Sánchez-Villamil et al. (2005) [2] (Apertium currently uses hidden Markov models). The specification file should be as similar as possible as the one used now.

Rationale

The taggers described are very intuitive and may easily be turned into a compact set of finite-state rules (no need to handle probabilities after training), and may be trained in an unsupervised manner. Depending on the language, the sliding window of words to be analyzed may be configured to suit it.

Programming requirements

C or C++ for maximum efficiency.

Linguistic requirements

basic knowledge of the grammar of the language(s) involved

Further reading

see above

Interested parties

Mlforcada