User:Shash42/GSoC 2020 Proposal: Bilingual Dictionary Discovery

From Apertium
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Google Summer of Code 2020: Proposal

Bilingual Dictionary Generation via Graph Exploration

Contact Details

  • Name: Shashwat Goel
  • Official Email: [shashwat.goel@research.iiit.ac.in]
  • IRC: shash42
  • Personal (Google) Email: [shashwatnow@gmail.com]
  • GitHub: [shash42]
  • LinkedIn: [shashwatgoel42]
  • Timezone: UTC +5:30

About Me

I am an undergraduate research student pursuing Computer Science at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. I have been involved in CS and Linguistics through olympiads for the past 4 years.

Interests

I am interested in Natural Language Processing, Deep Learning, and Applied Math. I am fascinated by computational solutions where they're least expected. My hobbies are competitive programming, math (problem-solving of any sort really), writing, playing chess and keeping in touch with developments in space exploration.

Why am I interested in Apertium?

Growing up in India, I realized that the very linguistic and cultural diversity that leads to unique perspectives acts as a barrier to inclusion. Technological solutions do not attract large sections of society as they just can’t be communicated to them. Seamless translation systems and the inclusion of regional languages is, therefore, the need of the hour. However, popular deep learning based solutions for machine translation cannot fulfill the task of preserving linguistic diversity, simply because endangered languages don’t offer sufficient data. Apertium is much more suited for this goal. It is inherently targeted at low-resource, similar yet mutually unintelligible language-pairs. It is a dream organization for me because I get to contribute to a cause that is close to my heart.

Besides this, the project that I wish to work on is ideally suited for my interests. It allows me to work on an open research problem, having immense scope for creativity, optimization, and experimentation. It suitably lies at the intersection of two of my favorite topics, graph theory, and semantics. It goes without saying that I find it a perfect fit!