User:GD/proposal

Contact information

Name: Irina Glazunova

Location: Moscow, Russia

University: NRU HSE, Moscow (National Research University Higher School of Economics)

E-mail: glaz.dikobraz@gmail.com

Timezone: UTC+3

Am I good enough?

Education: Bachelor's Degree in Fundamental and Computational Linguistics (2015-2019) at NRU HSE

Courses:

• Programming (Python, Flask, HTML)
• Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Typology/Language Diversity
• Mathematics (Discrete Mathemathics, Linear Algebra and Calculus, Probability Theory, Mathematical Statistics, Computability and Complexity)
• Latin, Latin in modern Linguistics, Ancient Literature

Languages: Russian (native), English (Academic), French, Latin

Personal qualities: responsibility, punctuality, being hard-working, passion for Latin and programming, perseverance, resistance to stress

Why is it I am interested in machine translation? Why is it that I am interested in Apertium?

The speed of information circulation does not allow to spend time on human translation. I am truly interested in formal methods and models because they represent the way any language is constructed (as I see them). Despite some exceptions, in general language is very logical and the main problem is how to find proper systematic description. Apertium is a powerful platform that allows to build impressive rule-based engines. Languages like Latin are well-ordered, particularly their morphology, so it makes rule-based translation very promising.

Which of the published tasks am I interested in? What do I plan to do?

I would like to add Latin-Russian language pair. I plan to do my best to reach higher results, more details are given in Proposal part.

Why Google and Apertium should sponsor it? How and who it will benefit in society?

Latin is the language of a great importance. Furthermore, studying Latin has a centuries-old history in Russia. Besides, Russian is spoken in different countries so much larger audience will benefit from this project. In Russia there are a lot of universities where students study Latin (faculties of Linguistics, Philology, History, Law, Medicine). Consequently, there is need for translation, not to mention a great heritage of ancient writers, poets and philosophers as Cicero, Catullus and others. Today only a couple of platforms have Latin-Russian pair, but they still have a lot work to do. So, a perspective of creating this pair is very promising. What is more, it is promising because these languages have a lot in common (morphological system, syntactic role marking).

Week by week work plan

Week 0: until 05/29 : Preparation

          	Get familiar with Apertium system in details (wiki-sources, installing, creating files etc)
          	Get a corpora of texts for future test and frequency list by using both Wikipedia in Latin and classic texts by Caesar, Cicero, Vergilius and others.
          	Plan every step and write down everything as formally as it is possible (in natural language)
          	Discuss details with a mentor
          	U\V and I\J problem

Week 1: 05\30 – 06\05 : Dictionary: nouns & adjectives (they have same declension patterns)

          	Add nouns to dictionary
          	Describe morphology
          	Add prepositions (they are closely related to nouns)

Week 2: 06\07 – 06\12 : Dictionary: verbs

          	Add verbs to dictionary
          	Plan how to convert basic times

Week 3: 06\13 – 06\19 : Transfer rules Start writing transfer rules

          	Write basic transfer rules related to morphological transfers
          	Similar cases (case systems of these languages have a lot in common)

Week 4: 06\20 – 06\26 :

          	Extend dictionary
          	Add word from other classes to the dictionary (especially, closed classes)
          	Finish all work scheduled for this period
          	Prepare for the first evaluation
          	Prepare detailed theoretical basis for the next phase

Comment: first part is meant to be mostly technical and consist of some general and routine work. Results: dictionary data, basic rules, morphological system, first testing

First evaluation

Week 5: 06\27 – 07\03 : Syntactic rules (word order)

          	Solve general word order problems

Week 6: 07\04 – 07\10 : Structures

          	Add basic structures as accusativus cum infinitivo, ablativus absolutus etc

Week 7: 07\11 – 07\17 :

          	Extend dictionary
          	Add more words from open classes

Week 8: 07\18 – 07\24 : Context based disambiguation

Comment: second part is meant to be main part that suppose working on translation algorithms. Results: extended dictionary data, syntactic rules, beta version of the system is ready to be used, beta testing

Second evaluation

Week 9: 07\25 – 07\31 : Syntactic rules 2

          	Extend number of syntactic rules
          	Testing

Week 10: 08\01 – 08\07 : Testing

          	Fixing issues that would appear

Extending data or rules (depending on previous results)

Week 11: 08\08 – 08\14 : Vacation

          	I will be able to do some work, I will have a laptop but may have some troubles with internet access.

Week 12: 08\15 – 08\21 : Final work on details

          	Put everything in order

Comment: improving system as much as it possible Results: all rules written, final version of the system, testing, bugs fixed