User:Sokureo

Contact information

Name: Elena Sokur

E-mail address: pelmenium.sokurium@gmail.com

IRC: sokureo

Location: Moscow, Russia

Timezone: UTC+3

GitHub: https://github.com/Sokureo

Why is it that you are interested in Apertium?

Apertium is a free/open-source platform which adopts contemporary technologies to minority languages. As a linguist, I consider it my duty to keep minority languages alive and make them more accessible and popular technically is a good way to do that. As a computational linguist, it would be great to apply my knowledge in the language theory to machine translation.

Reasons why Google and Apertium should sponsor it

Komi-Zyrian and Udmurt are very close-related languages which have common features in grammar and syntax. These facts make this project realistic, but still no one has adopted this pair (not only in Apertium). Currently the udm-kpv language pair is in the incubator: there are very few words in the bilingual dictionary and no rules. Monolingual dictionaries exist, but they do not have 100% percent coverage. I am going to fill the dictionaries, write transfer rules and make the translator usable in production.

Skills and qualifications

I am a 3rd-year student of the Bachelor's programme "Fundamental and Computational Linguistics" in National Research University Higher School of Economics (NRU HSE), Russia.

Main university courses:

• Programming (Python, R)
• Computer Tools for Linguistic Research
• Theory of Language (Phonetics, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Discourse)
• Machine Learning
• Math (Discrete Math, Linear Algebra and Calculus, Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics)
• Theory of Algorithms

Technical skills:

• Programming languages: Python, R
• Web-design: HTML, CSS
• Frameworks: Flask, Django
• Databases: SQLite, MySQL

Field work experience:

2 years of expeditions in:

• Beserman dialect of Udmurt
• Hill Mari

Languages: Russian (native), English (advanced), German (intermediate), Udmurt (reading), Komi-Zyrian (basic knowledge of grammar).

What do you plan to do?

I plan to develop a language pair Udmurt and Komi-Zyrian (udm-kpv), which is now in incubator.

Coding Challenge

1. Installed Apertium tools.

2. Installed kpv-udm language pair using this instruction: http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Udmurt_and_Komi. Morphological analyzers for Komi-Zyrian and Udmurt exist.

3. Found kpv-udm parallel texts (only one is aligned).

4. Added some words from the aligned text to the Bilingual dictionary and translated one sentence.

5. Estimated the coverage of Udmurt and Komi wikis: 77% for Udmurt and 90% for Komi.

6. Counted non-disambiguated words: 30% in Udmurt and 62% in Komi.

Non-Summer-of-Code plans for the Summer

From 17th June to 2nd July I will be in the Khanty expedition, but there is the Internet connection here, so I will be able to cooperate.