Ideas for Google Summer of Code
Contents |
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 ~~~
The page is intended as an overview of the kind of projects we have in mind. If one of them particularly piques your interest, please come and discuss with us on #apertium
on irc.freenode.net
, mail the mailing list, or draw attention to yourself in some other way.
Here are some more things you could look at:
- the open bugs page on Bugzilla
- pages in the development category
- resources that could be converted or expanded in the incubator.
- Unhammer's wishlist
List
Task | Difficulty | Description | Rationale | Requirements | Interested mentors |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Morphology with HFST (and Foma) read more... | 3. Medium | Modify the Helsinki Finite State Toolkit to work nicely with Apertium (the Apertium stream format, Superblanks etc.). That will involve implementing the tokenise-as-you-analyse algorithm as presented in this paper.[1]. For bonus points, do the same for Foma. | The Helsinki Finite State Toolkit provides a drop-in replacement for the Xerox lexc and twol formalisms. There are many morphological analysers/generators "in the wild" written in these formalisms, and they provide substantial features for dealing with morphologically complex languages. |
C++, Knowledge of FSTs | Francis Tyers |
Java port of Apertium runtime read more... | 3. Medium | We have a Java version of 3/4 of the core elements of Apertium. Do the rest and integrate. | This consists mainly of porting the HMM tagger (some parts have already been ported, HMM and loading of data is incomplete and untested). | Java (reading C++ code required) | Jacob Nordfalk, Jimregan |
Easy dictionary maintenance read more... | 2. Hard | Write code that simplifies the maintenance of the single-word part of Apertium monolingual and bilingual dictionaries. | Apertium dictionaries are very heterogeneous, but a great part of the development of a language pair consists in adding single words to monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, and, indeed, work on this part of the dictionaries is crucial for coverage and usefulness. Currently, dictionary maintenance is difficult because it involves editing an XML file. This may be slowing down the development of many language pairs. | Knowledge of XML, XSLT and one programming language that allows XML processing and easy writing of a user interface | Mlforcada, Jimregan, Jacob Nordfalk, Japerez |
Discontiguous multiwords read more... | 3. Medium | The task will be to develop, or adapt a module to deal with these kind of contiguous multiword expressions, for example, taking 'liggja ekki fyrir' and reordering it as 'liggja# fyrir ekki'. | In many languages, such as English, Norwegian and Icelandic, there are discontiguous multiwords, e.g. phrasal verbs, that we cannot easily support. For example 'liggja ekki fyrir' in Icelandic should be translated in English as 'to be not clear', but we cannot have 'liggja fyrir' as a traditional multiword because of the extra 'adverb', or it could even be a whole NP. | C++, Knowledge of FSTs | Francis Tyers, Jimregan |
Flag diacritics in lttoolbox read more... | 2. Hard | Adapt lttoolbox to elegantly use flag diacritics. | This will involve designing some changes to our XML dictionary format (see lttoolbox, and implementing the associated changes in the FST compiling processing code. | C++, XML, Knowledge of FSTs | Francis Tyers, Jacob Nordfalk |
Flag diacritics in lttoolbox-java read more... | 2. Hard | Adapt lttoolbox-java to elegantly use flag diacritics. | This will involve designing some changes to our XML dictionary format (see lttoolbox, and implementing the associated changes in the FST compiling processing code. | Java, XML, Knowledge of FSTs | Jacob Nordfalk |
Linguistically-driven bilingual-phrase filtering for inferring transfer rules | 3. Medium | Re-working apertium-transfer-training-tools to filter the set of bilingual phrases automatically obtained from a word-aligned sentence pair by using linguistic criteria. | Apertium-transfer-training-tools is a cool piece of software that generates shallow-transfer rules from aligned parallel corpora. It could greatly speed up the creation of new language pairs by generating rules that would otherwise have to be written by human linguists | C++, general knowledge of GIZA++, Perl considered a plus. | Jimregan |
Context-dependent lexicalised categories for inferring transfer rules | 2. Hard | Re-working apertium-transfer-training-tools to use context-dependent lexicalised categories in the inference of shallow-transfer rules. | Apertium-transfer-training-tools generates shallow-transfer rules from aligned parallel corpora. It uses an small set of lexicalised categories, categories that are usually involved in lexical changes, such as prepositions, pronouns or auxiliary verbs. Lexicalised categories differentiate from the rest of categories because their lemmas are taken into account in the generation of rules. | C++, general knowledge of GIZA++, XML. | Jimregan |
Improve integration of lttoolbox in libvoikko |
3. Medium | Dictionaries from lttoolbox can now be used for spellchecking directly with libvoikko (see Spell checking). The idea of this project is to improve the integration. Fix bugs, look at ways of codifying "standard"/"sub-standard" forms in our dictionaries. | Spell checkers can be useful, for languages other than English moreso. They are one of the "must have" items of language technology. If we can re-use Apertium data for this purpose it will help both the project (by making creating new language pairs more rewarding) and the language communities (by making more useful software). | XML, C++. | Francis Tyers |
Complex multiwords | 2. Hard | Write a bidirectional module for specifying complex multiword units, for example dirección general and zračna luka. See Multiwords for more information. | Although in the Romance languages it is not a big problem, as soon as you start to get to languages with cases (e.g. Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, German, etc.) the problem comes that you can't define a multiword of adj nom because the adjective has a lot of inflection. |
Java or C++, XML | Jimregan |
Adopt a language pair read more... |
4. Entry level | Take on an orphaned language pair, and bring it up to release quality results. What this quality will be will depend on the language pair adopted, and will need to be discussed with the prospective mentor. This will involve writing linguistic data (including morphological rules and transfer rules — which are specified in a declarative language) | Apertium has a few pairs of languages (e.g. sh-mk, en-af, ga-gd, etc...) that are orphaned, they don't have active maintainers. A lot of these pairs have a lot of work already put in, just need another few months to get them to release quality. See also Incubator | XML, a scripting language (Python, Perl), good knowledge of the language pair adopted. | Francis Tyers, Jimregan, Kevin Scannell, Trondtr, Niunniminuni |
Post-edition tool |
3. Medium | Make a post-edition tool to speed up revision of Apertium translations. It would likely include at least support for spelling and grammar checking, along with defining user-specified rules for fixing translations (search and replace, etc.). This tool can reuse an existing grammar checker such as LanguageTool. | After translating with Apertium revision work has to be done to consider a translation as an "adequate" translation. An intelligent post-edition environment will help doing this task. In this environment some typical mistakes in the translation process that can be automatically detected (for example unknown words and homographs) could be highlighted to be taken in consideration while doing post-edition. Some typical mistakes could also be defined to advise the post-editor to check them. The application could be more useful if it is built as a web application. | XML, PHP, Python, Java, C, C++, whichever programming language, platforms for building web applications. | Japerez, Jimregan, villarejo |
Detect 'hidden' unknown words | 3. Medium | The part-of-speech tagger of Apertium can be modified to work out the likelihood of each 'tag' in a certain context, this can be used to detect missing entries in the dictionary. | Apertium dictionaries may have incomplete entries, that is, surface forms (lexical units as they appear in running texts) for which the dictionary does not provided all the possible lexical forms (consisting of lemma, part-of-speech and morphological inflection information). As those surface form for which there is at least one lexical form cannot be considered unknown words, it is difficult to know whether all lexical forms for a given surface form have been included in the dictionaries or not. This feature will detect 'possible' missing lexical forms for those surface forms in the dictionaries. | C++ if you plan to modify the part-of-speech tagger; whatever if rewriting it from scratch. | Felipe Sánchez-Martínez |
Format filters | 4. Entry level | Making apertium capable of dealing with more different formats, for the minimum: files marked up with LaTeX and MediaWiki. | Apertium can currently deal with texts in plain-text, RTF, HTML and ODT formats by means of a format definition file. It should be easy to use the same language to define filters for other formats. | Apertium format definition language and/or scripting languages. | Villarejo |
Geriaoueg vocabulary assistant |
4. Entry level | Extend Geriaoueg so that it works more reliably with broken HTML and with any given language pair. | Geriaoueg is a program that provides "popup" vocabulary assistance, something like BBC Vocab or Lingro. Currently it only works with Breton--French, Welsh--English and Spanish--Breton. This task would be to develop it to work with any language in our SVN and fix problems with processing and displaying non-standard HTML. | PHP, C++, XML | Francis Tyers |
Corpus-assisted dictionary expansion | 4. Entry level | Semi-automatic bilingual word equivalence retrieval from a bitext and a monolingual word list. | Improve an existing Python script to retrieve the best translations (suggestions) of a word (typically an unknown word) given a particular parallel text corpus. Perhaps combine the result with automatic paradigm guessing (also suggestions) to improve the productivity of the lexical work for most contributors | Python, C/C++, AWK, Bash, perhaps web interface in PHP,Python,Ruby on Rails | Sortiz, Jimregan, Villarejo |
Improvements to target-language tagger training read more... | 2. Hard | Modify apertium-tagger-training-tools so that it can deals with n-stage transfer rules when segmenting the input source-language text, and applies a k-best viterbi pruning approach that does not require to compute the a-priori likelihood of every disambiguation path before pruning. | apertium-tagger-training-tools is a program for doing target-language tagger training, meaning it improves POS tagging performance specifically for the translation task, achieving a result for unsupervised training comparable with supervised training. This task would also require switching the default perl-based language model to either IRSTLM or RandLM (or both!). Read more | C++, XML, XSLT | Felipe Sánchez-Martínez |
VM for the transfer module | 3. Medium | VM for the current transfer architecture of Apertium and for the future transfers, pure C++ | Define an instruction set for a virtual machine that processes transfer code, then implement a prototype in Python, then porting to C++. | Python, C/C++, XML, XSLT, code optimisation, JIT techniques, etc. | Sortiz |
Notes
- ↑ Alicia Garrido-Alenda, Mikel L. Forcada, Rafael C. Carrasco (2002) Incremental construction and maintenance of morphological analysers based on augmented letter transducers
Further reading
- Accent and diacritic restoration
- 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
- P.W. Wagacha; G. De Pauw; P.W. Githinji (2006) "A grapheme-based approach to accent restoration in Gĩkũyũ". Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation
- D. Yarowsky (1994) "A Comparison Of Corpus-Based Techniques For Restoring Accents In Spanish And French Text". Proceedings, 2nd annual workshop on very large corpora. pp. 19--32
- K. Scannell (2010) "Statistical Unicodification of African Languages". Submitted for publication.
- Automated lexical extraction
- M. Forsberg H. Hammarström A. Ranta. "Morphological Lexicon Extraction from Raw Text Data". FinTAL 2006, LNAI 4139, pp. 488--499.
- Support for agglutinative languages
- Beesley, K. R and Karttunen, L. (2000) "Finite-State Non-Concatenative Morphotactics". SIGPHON-2000, Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop of the ACLSpecial Interest Group in Computational Phonology, pp. 1--12,
- Transfer rule learning
- Sánchez-Martínez, F. and Forcada, M.L. (2009) "Inferring shallow-transfer machine translation rules from small parallel corpora" In Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. volume 34, p. 605-635.
- Target-language driven part-of-speech tagger training
- Sánchez-Martínez, F.; Pérez-Ortiz, J.A. and Forcada, M.L. (2008) "Using target-language information to train part-of-speech taggers for machine translation". In Machine Translation, volume 22, numbers 1-2, p. 29-66.