Google Code-in/Application 2013

(First draft in by --Mlforcada 08:03, 27 October 2013 (UTC))

The Apertium project develops a free/open-source platform for machine translation and language technology. We try and focus our efforts on lesser-resourced and marginalised languages, but also work with larger languages.
The platform, including data for a large number of language pairs, a translation engine and auxiliary tools is being developed around the world, both in universities and companies (e.g. Prompsit Language Engineering) and by a growing numbers independent free-software developers.
There are currently 37 published language pairs within the project (including a number of "firsts" — for example Spanish—Occitan, Breton—French, Basque—Spanish, North Sámi--Norwegian Bokmål and Kazakh-Tatar among others), and many more in development.

mikel.forcada@gmail.com

(This list to be checked: got it from an e-mail discussion --Mlforcada 07:38, 27 October 2013 (UTC))

Apertium is really keen on participating in Google Code-in for the following three reasons:

In previous years we have really benefitted from GCI. I changed a comma here by a period. In any free software project, there are often tasks that get pushed to the bottom of a developer's todo list, but aren't big enough for a GSOC project. We have found GCI students immensely good at helping us out with these. There have also been GCI projects which have become crucial pieces of code -- for example Nathan Maxon's Kazakh analyser, which went on to be key to developing the first Kazakh-Tatar MT system, and Pim Otte's Afrikaans-Dutch system, which he presented at an international MT conference.
As Apertium is a project that focusses a lot on marginalised languages, GCI gives us a chance of getting in touch with the next generation of speakers, and showing them how they can help their languages develop and give them some esteem. Language shift (abandoning one's language after perceiving it is not useful for wider spheres of communication) often occurs at this age, and if we can show them that their language is usfeul, and

other people care, and there is no barrier for its use in the 'electronic' space then that might give it more chance of survival.

Finally, teaching the kids is just really rewarding. Helping them out, answering questions, explaining things, and when they get it, it's like a spark goes off, and even if it has taken a long time to explain, it's a really great feeling. In fact, some of our mentors are University instructors who unfortunately find too often that university students are not too good at programming and that teaching them is hard and unrewarding; working with pre-university people may motivate them in the face of such a hard task but also give them clues on how to teach programming at the university level.

What years has your organisation participated in Google Summer of Code? Please indicate the years you have participated in Google Code-in or GHOP if applicable.*

Please provide a link to your tasks page. This is one of the most important parts of your application as it lets us see what type of work you plan to have the students work on for Google Code-in and shows you already have some ideas of the types of tasks students would work on. Please be sure to include at least 4 tasks from each of the 5 categories. This is similar to the Google Summer of Code Ideas page. *

C/C++, Java, Python, perl, Apertium's internal XML formats for grammatical transformation rules and dictionaries

What is the main development mailing list for your organisation? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organisation for Google Code-in 2013. If your organisation uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use.*

apertium-stuff@lists.sourceforge.net (general list: most traffic here)
apertium-dev@lists.sourceforge.net (some involved development discussions may move on to this one)
apertium-turkic@lists.sourceforge.net (for discussions relating to Turkic-language development)

Please tell us about how your organisation has prepared for Google Code-in, including what (and how many) mentors and organisation administrators have agreed to help, what your schedule and response time will be during the holidays (and otherwise during the contest period) and how you plan to deal with unresponsive mentors.*

(Fran had a text about this, but I want to have something just in case --Mlforcada 07:44, 27 October 2013 (UTC))

Currently we have more than 60 tasks, and many of the tasks listed refer generically to "a language pair" of which there are dozens. Therefore, there will be plenty of tasks available to students.
Currently 12 mentors (and two admins) have already signed up, but we are actively recruiting mentors for language-pair tasks among the (dozens of) language-pair developers in the project:
- Bernard Chardonneau
- Miquel Esplà
- Mikel L. Forcada (backup admin)
- Xavi Ivars
- Fulup Jakez
- Jim O'Regan
- Ilnar Salimzyan
- Felipe Sánchez-Martínez
- Francis M. Tyers (admin)
- Kevin Unhammer
- Nikant Vohra
- Jonathan N. Washington
In addition to these mentors, there will be plenty of help available to students as there are always Apertium developers hanging out on the Apertium IRC channel.
For most of the mentors listed above, hanging out on the Apertium IRC list, hacking and helping other developers hack is what we do most of the free time we have, because we do it for fun. For those of us that work, the 'holidays' are really when we are most active in Apertium. In past Google Code-Ins our organisation has had no problem to respond in time to students.
If for some reason (in our experience, it would have to be either task overload or 'force majeure'!) a mentor becomes unresponsive, administrators will be on call to reassign the task to another mentor.

Please include a link to the logo you would like to use if your org is chosen as a mentoring org for 2013. This allows us to post the logos of the GCI 2013 mentoring orgs as soon as we announce them on November 1, 2013.*

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