Ideas for Google Summer of Code
Revision as of 21:13, 15 February 2012 by Francis Tyers (talk | contribs)
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, add your name to "Interested mentors" 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.
Note that, if you have an idea that isn't mentioned here, we would be very interested to hear about it.
Here are some more things you could look at:
- Top tips for GSOC applications
- Get in contact with one of our long-serving mentors — they are nice, honest!
- Pages in the development category
- Resources that could be converted or expanded in the incubator. Consider doing or improving a language pair (see incubator and nursery for pairs that need work)
- Unhammer's wishlist
- The open bugs page on Bugzilla
List format proposals
New #1
| Adopt a language pair | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| How ? (required skills) |
What ? (description) |
Why ? (rationale) |
Who ? (mentors) |
| XML, a scripting language (Python, Perl), good knowledge of the language pair adopted. | 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 — and possibly Constraint Grammar rules if that is relevant) | Apertium has a few pairs of languages (e.g. mt-he, ga-gd, ur-hi, id-ms, pl-cs, 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 | Francis Tyers, Jimregan, Kevin Scannell, Trondtr, Unhammer, Darthxaher, Firespeaker |
| 4. Entry level | read more... | ||
| Discontiguous multiwords | |||
| How ? (required skills) |
What ? (description) |
Why ? (rationale) |
Who ? (mentors) |
| C++, Knowledge of FSTs | 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. | Francis Tyers, Jimregan |
| 3. Medium | read more... | ||
| Flag diacritics in lttoolbox | |||
| How ? (required skills) |
What ? (description) |
Why ? (rationale) |
Who ? (mentors) |
| C++ or Java, XML, Knowledge of FSTs | Adapt lttoolbox to elegantly use flag diacritics. Flag diacritics are a way of avoiding transducer size blow-up by discarding impossible paths at runtime as opposed to compile time. | This will involve designing some changes to our XML dictionary format (see lttoolbox, and implementing the associated changes in the FST compiling processing code. The reason behind this is that many languages have prefix inflection, and we cannot currently deal with this without either making paradigms useless, or overanalysing (e.g. returning analyses where none exist). Flag diacritics (or constraints) would allow us to restrict overanalysis without blowing up the size of our dictionaries. | Francis Tyers (C++), Jacob Nordfalk (Java) |
| 2. Hard | read more... | ||
| Rule-based finite-state disambiguation | |||
| How ? (required skills) |
What ? (description) |
Why ? (rationale) |
Who ? (mentors) |
| XML, C++ | Currently Apertium only has a bigram/trigram part-of-speech tagger. The objective of this task would be to implement a disambiguation framework for Apertium that can be expressed as a finite-state transducer. It might be a good idea to express this as constraint rules, in a novel XML-based file format. | For some languages, bigram/trigram POS disambiguation really doesn't work, especially when you want to disambiguate morphology (e.g. number, case) along with part-of-speech. So far we've been using constraint grammar for some of these languages. But although Constraint Grammar is great and powerful, it is also pretty slow. It would be a good idea to look at LanguageTool, and IceParser and Apertium's own apertium-lex-tools to get ideas on how this might be accomplished. | Francis Tyers |
| 2. Hard | read more... | ||
| Complex multiwords | |||
| How ? (required skills) |
What ? (description) |
Why ? (rationale) |
Who ? (mentors) |
| Java or C++, XML, Knowledge of FSTs | 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. |
Jimregan |
| 2. Hard | read more... | ||
| Optimise the VM for transfer | |||
| How ? (required skills) |
What ? (description) |
Why ? (rationale) |
Who ? (mentors) |
| Python, C++, XML, code optimisation, JIT techniques, etc. | The current VM for the transfer architecture of Apertium is up to five times slower than the XML tree-walking implementation. The job of this task is to optimise the C++ code to make it faster than XML tree-walking. | The rationale behind this is that XML tree-walking is quite slow and CPU intensive. In modern (3 or more stage) pairs, transfer takes up most of the CPU. There are other options, like Bytecode for transfer, but we would like something that does not require external libraries and is adapted specifically for Apertium. | Sortiz |
| 3. Medium | read more... | ||
| Accent and diacritic restoration | |||
| How ? (required skills) |
What ? (description) |
Why ? (rationale) |
Who ? (mentors) |
| C, C++, XML, familiarity with linguistic issues, knowledge of FSTs preferable | Create an optional module to restore diacritics and accents on input text, and integrate it into the Apertium pipeline. | Many languages use diacritics and accents in normal writing, and Apertium is designed to use these, however in some places, especially for example. instant messaging, irc, searching in the web etc. these are often not used or untyped. This causes problems as for the engine, traduccion is not the same as traducción. | Kevin Scannell, Trondtr |
| 4. Entry level | read more... | ||
| Geriaoueg vocabulary assistant | |||
| How ? (required skills) |
What ? (description) |
Why ? (rationale) |
Who ? (mentors) |
| PHP, C++, XML | Extend Geriaoueg so that it works more reliably with broken HTML, with any given language pair (e.g. support for both lttoolbox and HFST. | 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. | Francis Tyers |
| 4. Entry level | read more... | ||
| Apertium on your mobile | |||
| How ? (required skills) |
What ? (description) |
Why ? (rationale) |
Who ? (mentors) |
| Java, C++ | Port Apertium to iPhone and Android. | Apertium has a Java port, but it doesn't currently work on mobile telephones. Lots of people have mobile telephones, and some of them would like to have a translator there. | Jacob Nordfalk |
| 3. Medium | read more... | ||
Jacob's idea
| Adopt a language pair (more...) | ||
|---|---|---|
| What ? | Why ? | Mentors |
| 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 — and possibly Constraint Grammar rules if that is relevant) | Apertium has a few pairs of languages (e.g. mt-he, ga-gd, ur-hi, id-ms, pl-cs, 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 | Francis Tyers, Jimregan, Kevin Scannell, Trondtr, Unhammer, Darthxaher, Firespeaker |
| Entry level - required skills: XML, a scripting language (Python, Perl), good knowledge of the target language in the pair adopted. | ||
| Discontiguous multiwords | ||
| What ? | Why ? | Mentors |
| 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. | Francis Tyers, Jimregan |
| Medium - requires C++, knowledge of FSTs | read more... | |
| Flag diacritics in lttoolbox | ||
| What ? | Why ? | Mentors |
| Adapt lttoolbox to elegantly use flag diacritics. Flag diacritics are a way of avoiding transducer size blow-up by discarding impossible paths at runtime as opposed to compile time. | This will involve designing some changes to our XML dictionary format (see lttoolbox, and implementing the associated changes in the FST compiling processing code. The reason behind this is that many languages have prefix inflection, and we cannot currently deal with this without either making paradigms useless, or overanalysing (e.g. returning analyses where none exist). Flag diacritics (or constraints) would allow us to restrict overanalysis without blowing up the size of our dictionaries. | Francis Tyers (C++), Jacob Nordfalk (Java) |
| Hard - requires C++ or Java, XML, Knowledge of FSTs | read more... | |
List
Note: The table below is sortable by column. Click on the little squares below or next to the headers.
| Task | Difficulty | Description | Rationale | Requirements | Interested mentor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Improve integration of lttoolbox in libvoikko and libhfst read more... |
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 |
| Regular expressions in lt-tmxproc read more... | 2. Hard | Adding regex support to lt-tmxproc would maximise the amount of translations we can get from an available TMX. | lt-tmxproc already includes some limited support for making translation units in a TMX file into something of a template, but only for digits. Gintrowicz and Jassem describe an interesting idea, using user-definable regular expressions, to turn items such as dates into templates. lttoolbox already has support for a subset of regular expressions; add a mechanism to allow the user to make use of this, and to include these regular expressions in processing. | C++, Knowledge of FSTs | Jimregan |
| Quality control framework | 3. Medium | Write a unified testing framework for released language pairs in Apertium. The system should be able to track both regressions with respect to previous versions, and quality checks with respect to previous quality evaluations. | We are gradually improving our quality control, with (semi-)automated tests, but these are done on the Wiki on an ad-hoc basis. Having a unified testing framework would allow us to be able to more easily track quality improvements over all language pairs, and more easily deal with regressions. See [1] | PHP or Python | Francis Tyers |
| Tree-based reordering read more... | 2. Hard | Currently we have a problem with very distantly related languages that have long-distance constituent reordering. Some languages have dependency parsers which create graphs of words. | The purpose of this task would be to create a module that comes before or after apertium-transfer which reorders the graph. | XML, C++ | Francis Tyers |
| Dictionary induction from wikis | 3. Medium | Extract dictionaries from linguistic wikis | Wiki dictionaries and encyclopedias (e.g. omegawiki, wiktionary, wikipedia, dbpedia) contain information (e.g. bilingual equivalences, morphological features, conjugations) that could be exploited to speed up the development of dictionaries for Apertium. This task aims at automatically building dictionaries by extracting different pieces of information from wiki structures such as interlingual links, infoboxes and/or from dbpedia RDF datasets. | MySQL, mediawiki syntax, perl, maybe C++ or Java; Java, Scala, RDF, and DBpedia to use DBpedia extraction | Atoral, Jimregan (dbpedia extraction only) |
| Inferring transfer rules with active learning | 2. Hard | Re-working apertium-transfer-training-tools to get more general rules. The right level of generalisation can be achieved by asking non-expert users to validate examples. | Apertium-transfer-training-tools generates shallow-transfer rules from aligned parallel corpora. The corpus-extracted rules provide a translation quality comparable with the expert-written ones. However, human-written rules are more general and easier to mantain. The purpose of this task is to reduce the number of inferred rules while keeping translation quality. Gaps in the information elicited from the parallel corpus are filled with knowledge from non-expert users to achieve the right degree of generalisation. | C++, general knowledge of GIZA++, XML. | Víctor M. Sánchez-Cartagena |
| Active learning to choose among paradigms which share superficial forms | 2. Hard | Developing an active learning algorithm to choose the most appropriate paradigm (in a monolingual dictionary) for a new word. Previous research work allows us to reduce the problem to a set of paradigms which share superficial forms but not lexical forms. | Current research on the addition of entries to a monolingual dictionary by non-expert users has partially solved the problem of choosing the best paradigm for a new word. However, when different paradigms share all the lexical forms the problem becomes harder. In such case, it is necessary to ask the users to validate sentences in which the word to be added acts as different lexical forms. Such sentences may be extracted from a monolingual corpus. | XML, Java, Web technologies. | Víctor M. Sánchez-Cartagena, Miquel Esplà-Gomis |
| Optimising paradigms | 3. Medium | Developing a tool to simplify the paradigms in monolingual dictionaries in order to minimise the redundancy. | The collaborative improvement of dictionaries can cause some degree of redundancy in paradigms (it is frequent to find paradigms generating a very similar set of lexical forms). Although apertium-dixtools includes an option to remove identical paradigms, this task consists in the implementation of a tool to reduce the redundancy in paradigms by generating all the lexical forms and restructuring the paradigms. | XML, Java. | Miquel Esplà-Gomis |
| Corpus-based distinction between verb/pronoun combinations in Romance languages |
2. Hard | Write a module which learns to distinguish between different translations of pronouns/verbs in Romance languages, e.g. "se come bien", "él se come", etc. | Some constructions are ambiguous in Romance languages (e.g. Spanish). One of these are verb/pronoun combinations, however, with any verb, some combinations are more likely than others. | C++, XML | |
| Corpus-based definiteness transfer | 3. Medium | Develop a program that uses information from corpora to improve the transfer of definiteness between language pairs which have it. | Languages treat definiteness differently, some using it more than others, in Apertium we typically just transfer it as is, but this has problems. read more... | C++, XML, python linguistics | Francis Tyers |
- Notes
- C14N stands for canonicalisation. These projects are intended to make it easier to develop new language pairs using Apertium without having to resort to non-Apertium modules.
Further reading
- 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.
- Regular expressions in lt-tmxproc
- Gintrowicz, J. and Jassem, K. (2007) "Using Regular Expressions in Translation Memories". In Proceedings of the International Multiconference on Computer Science and Information Technology, p. 87--92.
