Late critical feedback for Marc (sorry for being so late):
This is a very important project for Apertium in my opinion. While
Catalan is not an under-resourced language, it may soon be the official
language of a medium-sized country, and having an open-source
alternative is clearly a desirable situation for Catalan.
You say: "Apertium now provides an English-Catalan language pair good
for assimilation". I am not ready to accept this statement in the
motivation of a proposal. Some of my students, who use apertium-en-ca in
projects, would probably disagree or make a more cautious statement.
But, in any case, it would be better to say that it can be greatly
improved for dissemination purposes (we are excluding interactive
translation prediction here, where it may even be more useful).
One important problem with en→ca is that rules are very hard to modify.
The distribution of rules in .t1x and .t2x is not consistent. I would
advocate for a deep study of how rules are made now (producing a
documentation) and a complete rehaul of the rule base (ensuring no
regression), before even trying to actually improve them by "adding
transfer rules" as your proposal proposes.
I see very little discussion of actual structural transfer and CG rule
problems.
The coverage predictions are adequate if one assumes a Zipfian
distribution of naïve coverage.
I used this formula on Wolfram alpha, starting with 35000 enttries and a
coverage of 85,9%:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(0.859%2Fsum(1%2Fk,1,35000))*sum(1%2Fk,1,38000)
You probably did too, as the results are almost identical.
As the distribution is surely not Zipfian (meaning that some words that
are more probable than many words currently in the dictionary may still
be missing), the coverage figures will probably be better.
But, on the other hand, I don't see any justification for the WER
reduction forecast, unless the "unknown words" component of the current
WER is clearly quantified. Looks like ballpark figures. A WER of 0.199
would be outstanding for eng→cat.
Why is eng→cat (expected to be) so different from en→ca as regards WER?
Any justification for such a big drop in WER? What will bring this about?
It would be nice to have a study on how the main commercial rule-based
system (Lucy) currently does, to put the figures in perspective. Most of
the vocabulary in apertium-es-ca actually comes from Lucy (the language
data are property of the Generalitat de Catalunya, who decided to
release it through Apertium in 2007).
I find it however quite hard to see a GSoC student actually duplicating
the vocabulary of a language pair. You plan to add 35000 words ( 3000
stems a week in your proposal). You will work 30 h a week during 12
weeks. That is 360 h. This means that if you only added words, you would
be adding 100 words per hour. This is of course possible if you have
free/open-source sources of new vocabulary that size that can be
automatically (and legitimately) converted to Apertium format. You have
to provide compelling evidence that this will actually happen.
By the way, there is no mention of where you will work additional hours
to make up for the exam period.
I hope there is time to improve your proposal along these lines.
Cheers
Mikel
El 30/03/17 a les 11:11, Marc Riera Irigoyen ha escrit:
Hello everyone,
I have been working on my proposal for this year's GSoC and I have
published a first version of it on the wiki. You can find it here:
http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/User:Marcriera/proposal
It would be great to get some feedback about it. The workplan is not
final, as I am working on the coding challenge and it will be based on
the results.
Thank you!
Marc Riera
--
*Marc Riera Irigoyen
*
Freelance Translator EN/JA>CA/ES*
*(+34) 652 492 008*
*
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Mikel L. Forcada http://www.dlsi.ua.es/~mlf/
Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics
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