GSoC/2014/Project ideas

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Ideas for Google Summer of Code 2014

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A spell checker for Indic language that understands inflections

Project:

SILPA project has a spellchecker written using python with a not so simple algorithm. But still it is not capable of handling inflection and agglutination occurring in Indian languages especially south Indian languages. The dictionary we have for Malayalam spellchecker have about 150000 words. Of course we can expand the dictionary, but that doesn't have much value since words can be formed in Malayalam or Tamil etc by joining multiple words. In addition to that, words get inflected based on grammar forms(sandhi), plural, gender etc. Hunspell has a system to handle this, but so far nobody succeeded in getting it working for multi level suffix stripping as required for Malayalam. Some times a Malayalam word can be formed by more than 5 words joining together. We will need a word splitting logic or a table taking care of all patterns. The project is to attempt solving this with hunspell. If that is not feasible(hunspell upstream is not active), develop an algorithm and implement it.

Recently Tamil attempted developing a spellchecker using Hunspell with multi level suffix stripping. You can see the result here https://github.com/thamizha/solthiruthi. Our attempt should be first to use Hunspell to achieve spellchecking with agglutination and inflection. Probably it will require lot of scripting to generate suffix patterns, we can ask help from existing language communities too. If Hunspell has limitation with multi level suffxes- sometimes Indian languages require more than 5 levels of suffix stripping, we need to document it(bug and documentation) and try to attempt python based solution on top of SILPA framework.

  • Savannah Task
  • Expertise required: Average level understanding of grammar system of at least one Indian language
  • Complexity: Advanced
  • Mentor : Santhosh Thottingal

Indic rendering support in ConTeXt

Project:

ConTeXt is another TeX macro system similar to LaTeX but much more suitable for design. To find more information about ConTeXt, see the wiki http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page. ConTeXt MKII have Indic language rendering support using XeTeX. but MKII is deprecated, and the new MKIV backend doesn't support Indic rendering yet. The aim of this project is to add support to Inidic rendering to ConTeXt MKIV. XeTeX is using Harfbuzz to do correct Indic rendering.

  • Savannah Task
  • Expertise required: Understanding of the TeX system, experience in either LaTeX or ConTeXt and basic understanding of Indic language rendering. MKIV uses Lua, familiarity with Lua, opentype specifications or Harfbuzz will be added advantage.
  • Mentor : Rajeesh K Nambiar
  • Complexity : Advanced
  • More Details: A partially working patch by Rajeesh for MKIV lua code is available. ConTeXt mkii (deprecated) can work with XeTeX backend for Indic rendering. Here is a sample file:
\usemodule[simplefonts]
\definefontfeature[malayalam][script=mlym]
\setmainfont[Rachana][features=malayalam]
\starttext
മലയാളം \TeX ഉപയോഗിച്ച് ടൈപ്പ്സെറ്റ് ചെയ്തത്
\stoptext

Generate the output using command 

texexec --xetex <file.tex>

Language model and Acoustic model for Malayalam language for speech recognition system in CMU Sphinx

CMU Sphinx is a large vocabulary, speaker independent speech recognition codebase and suite of tools, which can be used to develop speech recognition system in any language. To develop an automatic speech recognition system in a language, acoustic model and language model has to framed for that particular language. Acoustic models characterize how sound changes over time. It captures the characteristics of basic recognition units. The language model describes the likelihood, probability, or penalty taken when a sequence or collection of words is seen. It attempts to convey behavior of the language and tries to predict the occurrence of specific word sequences possible in the language. Once these two models are developed, it will be useful to every one doing research in speech processing. For Indian languages Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Marati, ASR systems have been developed using sphinx engine. In this project work is aimed at developing acoustic model and language model for Malayalam.

Mentor: Deepa P. Gopinath

Background Reading

SILPA BASED

Provide REST API for new flask based Silpa, including conversion of templates to this REST API from JSON RPC

Project: Silpa is now relying on JSONRPC. We need to, either completely move to REST API or provide REST API as an additional feature.

Expertise required: Python , Flask , Jinja , HTML, Javascript

Mentor : Vasudev/Jishnu


Converting indic processing modules currently in SILPA into Jquery library

Project: Port some of the silpa algorithms to Jquery.

Several modules, alogorithms in SILPA project is done in python now. But porting them to javascript(jQuery) helps developers. For example, cross language transliteration can be done jquery too if we port the algorithm and transliteration rules. Similarly the approximate search can be ported. A flexibile fuzzy search on the web pages will be possible if we have the algorithm in jquery. ALternatively these js libraries can be used with node.js using server side js concept too.

Expertise required: javascript,JQuery, python

Mentor :Jishnu

Improving cross language transliteration system.

Project:

Currently only Kannada and Malayalam are perfect rest all are first converted to Malayalam then to English due to lack of language internal. Also currently for English to Indic we use CMUDict so transliteration capability is limited to words in CMUDict only probably we could develop better method for English to Indic transliteration

CLDR has transliteration data for Indic languages. We can explore it and see the feasibility. For an intermediate representation of the scripts either IPA can be used or ISO 15919 standard can be used. All these must be supplemented with exception rules and special case handling to achieve more perfect result.

Expertise required:python

Mentor : Vasudev/Jishnu

Internationalize SILPA project with Wikimedia jquery projects , Improve the webfonts module in Silpa using jquery.webfonts and provide more Indic and complex fonts as part of it

Project:

Internationalize SILPA :- SILPA project has many Indic language applications, but as of now, if somebody want to input in Indian languages, there is no built in tool in it. Similarly, the application is not internationalized. Both of these can be achieved by using the jquery.ime and jquery.i18n libraries from Wikimedia. A sample implementation is avaliable in our website. The i18n should be in the SILPA flask framework with a nice templating system. Similarly the interface should have webfonts using jquery.webfonts library.

Improve the webfonts  :-

  • Currently Silpa provides 36 webfonts. add more fonts to this collection.
  • Rewrote webfonts module to use the features of jquery.webfonts
  • reate a repo as per jquery.webfonts specification
  • Provide a clean api so that other websites can use our webfonts in their websites
  • Document the usage
  • Provide font preview and download options
  • **This is partly done**.

More Details

Expertise required: jQuery, css, html5, Python , flask , technical understanding about fonts

Mentor : Jishnu/Vasudev

Language filter for diaspora

Diaspora is a Free Software, federated social networking platform. Diaspora users post in many languages. When people use more than one language in their posts, it is inconvenient for people who don't understand a language. This task is to tag every post with languages used in the post, ideally detected automatically, but with an option to override it. Once each post has a language tag, people should be able to choose their preferred language and posts in other languages should be hidden by default. Also provide an option to translate posts and comments.

  • Expertise required: Ruby on Rails
  • Mentor: Pirate Praveen, Ershad K

Varnam Based

Improvements to the REST API

This includes rewrite of the current implementation in `golang` and add support for WebSockets to improve the input experience. This also includes making scripts that would ease embedding input on any webpage. All the changes done will go live on[1]

Expertise required: Basic understanding of golang and C

Complexity : Advanced

Improve the learning system

The main goal of this is to improve how varnam tokenizes when learning words. Today, when a word is learned, varnam takes all the possible prefixes into account and learn all of them to improve future suggestions. But sometimes, this is not enough to predict good suggestions. An improvement is suggested which will try to infer the base form of the word under learning

Word corpus synchronization

Create a cross-platform synchronization tool which can upload/download the word corpus from offline IMEs like varnam-ibus[2]. This helps to build the online words corpus easily.

[1]: http://www.varnamproject.com [2]: https://gitorious.org/varnamproject/libvarnam-ibus/

Mentor: Navaneeth K N

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