User:Mathematic-alpha/gsoc-report

PROJECT: Adopt an unreleased language pair with a minimal user interface.

STATS and REPOs

Medumba progress
Date	byv lexicon size	Corpus size	Coverage
12.06.2019	189	8674	~0.37
20.06.2019	317	8674	~0.39
05.07.2019	317	8674	~0.56
10.07.2019	1186	6604	~0.83
2019-07-21	1703	22627	~65.21%
2019-07-25	1705	22637	~69.19%
2019-07-25	17594	22624	~77.77%
2019-08-05	27896	35035	~79.62%
2019-08-21	12245	14823	~90.01%

Medumba-French progress
Date	byv-fra lexicon size	Coverage	WER, PER
12.06.2019	1592	~0.10	Something
05.07.2019	1592	~0.20	Something
10.07.2019	1592	~0.35	Something

Monodix (Apertium-byv)
-My commits

Bidix (Apertium-byv-fra)
-My commits

Interface

Project description

A project on adoption of Medumba-Français language pair in Apertium had as its purpose a creation of machine translation system between Medumba and Français languages. As Medumba is one of the low-resource languages of the world the translation system is unlikely to be developed by other methods than Rule-Based Machine Translation. As the evidence of that we had only about 12 texts from Wikipedia incubator (links in Manifest) and quasi inexistent Medumba-Français aligned text sources as a source.

Generally project consisted of three main parts:

• Morphological analyzer for Medumba
• Medumba-Français bilingual dictionary (bidix)
• Transfer rules

A detailed work plan for the project can be found here.

Morphological Analyzer

We had to develop morphological analyzer almost from scratch. And the most challenging thing from the beginning was to find any properly organized lists of words or Medumba dictionaries. By the end of the Community Bonding period after 2 week of work we were able to analyze only 20% of words contained in wiki corpora. Coverage almost 90% by the end of Google Summer of Code program (if not of the bible text which is written in the old orthography).

Morphological analyzer is accompanied by twol file where 30 phonological rules are implemented. Twol is a kind of formalism used in Helsinki Finite State Technology (HFST). These rules resolve special cases of form transformations which could not be solved in morph analyzer, for example change of affixes after nasals etc. To prevent our transducer from phonological errors we wrote tests for various cases (contained in "tests" directory).

In addition we have managed to do syntactic tree annotation for some of the texts from our wiki corpora, although it is on the initial stage and requires corrections.

Sources

Here are some sources that we used to construct morphological dictionary.

1. Discubrir Corrientes. La Enciclopedia Virtual Correntina ;
2. Low Resource Language Dictionaries.

Bilingual Dictionary

The development of the bidix was halted for to the benefit of the morphological analyser for the Mə̀dʉ̂mbɑ̀.

Transfer rules

We cannot reproduce correctly the structure of the Français sentence as well as word forms with right Français inflections as we still have few transfer rules. Transfer rules are developed only for nouns and some postpositions so far but we are planning to do it in the nearest future.

Plans for future

1. Increase coverage as much as possible ;
2. Write transfer rules ;
3. Develop the interface ;

Acknowledgements and impressions of GSoC program

First of all I would like to express my total gratitude to Anastasia kuznetsova, mentor, who has always been very helpful and supportive (really). In course of GSoC program she helped me when i was stuck and she was always available. She is really helpful. I also thank Jonathan Washington, mentor, who put in all his efforts to make this project a success. Hopefully this project will motivate others and turn into larger academic work.