User:Ilnar.salimzyan/GSoC2014/Application

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GSoC application: Apertium-kaz-tat: machine translation between Kazakh and Tatar

Name: Ilnar Salimzyanov

E-mail adress: ilnar.salimzyan@gmail.com

Other information that may be useful to contact you:

IRC: selimcan Sourceforge account: selimcan Cellphone: +79625617985 Timezone: UTC+04.00

Which of the published tasks are you interested in? What do you plan to do?

Task: Adopting a language pair

Title: Apertium-kaz-tat — machine translation between Kazakh and Tatar

Work To do

List your skills and give evidence of your qualifications

I am the first year master’s student at the Kazan Federal University, studying Applied Linguistics

I got to know about Apertium first time in 2009, while writing a small paper at the university on comparison of available machine translation systems. Apertium fascinated me then being open source, showing rapid growth and being a good potential starting point for Tatar and other Turkic languages (yes, I have thought about them too). I played around with lttoolbox dictionary for Tatar (bad idea, I know, but I didn’t know about "X/S/HFST"s then and there weren’t any other Turkic languages involved). I even managed to model nouns morphotactics using it!

Back in 2009 I translated part of the Official Documentation into Russian (till chapter 3.2.3; besides someone willing to finish it the translation needs a good editor). Also in 2009 I translated Apertium New language pair Howto into Russian.

I was one of the participants of the Šupaškar Apertium Workshop, held in January this year, where Francis Tyers, Hector Alos-i-Font, Jonathan Washington and Trond Trosterud were instructors.

I was very fortunate to see Jonathan and Francis work on Tatar-Bashkir pair as an example pair for the Šupaškar Workshop and move it to nursery. It is very useful to have a transducer for my native language (and a language closest to it) to learn the semantics and structure of lexc and twol files (which I wasn’t really familiar with, since using HFST with Apertium is relatively new thing and it is not mentioned in the Official Documentation), along with the reading the famous FSMBook.

I have been involved in work on Tatar-Bashkir pair as, let’s say, “language-consultant” and “tester”. With another fellow from Ufa we have been translating top-5000 wordlist of Russian National Corpus into Tatar and Bashkir. This translations were added then to the translator files. Also, I have been analyzing some errors in the translations finding out, where Apertium-tt-ba performed not so well, describing it on the wiki and commiting from time to time to svn.