The Apertium project, a free/open-source rule-based machine translation platform in which the Transducens group has been strongly involved since its inception, is, for the fourth year in a row, one of the 10 free/open-source organizations selected by Google for the Google Code-In.

Google Code-In is a contest to introduce pre-university students (aged 13 to 17) to free/open-source software development. Students from all around the world can participate by tackling small tasks, which may include code writing, debugging, documentation, production of training material, etc. For each three tasks, students get a Google Code-In T-shirt. Each participating organization will select two winners of the Grand Prize: a trip to the Google headquarters for the students and a parent or tutor.

The Apertium project has proposed a wide variety of tasks, including the creation of documentation to help users and developers, the development of dictionaries and rules for new or existing languages, the development of programs to transform other existing free/open-source resources into Apertium format, the creation of extensions to ease the use of Apertium from third-party software, etc. There are also debugging and quality assessment tasks, and tasks in which texts are annotated so that they can be used to test and train Apertium modules.

The first students have already come by the Apertium IRC channel (#apertium at irc.freenode.net) to ask about the different tasks, even if the contest does not officially start until November 16, and mentors (approximately 20 for Apertium this year) have already started to guide them.

If you are a pre-university student interested in contributing to the development of our free/open-source machine translation system, come by and participate!

DATeCH brings together researchers and practitioners looking for innovative approaches for the creation, transformation and exploitation of historical documents in digital form.

www.datech2014.info

Topics

OCR technology and tools for historical documents including:

• Methods and tools for post-correction of OCR results.
• Automated quality control for mass OCR data.
• Innovative access methods for historical texts and corpora.
• Natural language processing of ancient languages (Latin, Greek).
• Visualization techniques and interfaces for search and research in digital humanities.
• Crowdsourcing techniques for collecting and annotating data in digital humanities.
• Enrichment of and metadata production for historical texts and corpora.

Important dates

• January 7, 2014 – Paper submission deadline
• February 28, 2014 – Decision notification
• March 31, 2014 – Camera-ready papers due
• May 19-20, 2014 – Conference

DATeCH 2014 is supported by the Succeed project and the Impact Centre of Competence in Digitisation.

Treballar amb el grup Transducens pot ser una bona elecció per al vostre treball de fi de grau o màster, o les vostres pràctiques a empreses. Us introduireu en un entorn de treball dinàmic i flexible que us permetrà començar a desenvolupar algunes de les competències necessàries per a poder incorporar-vos posteriorment en equips d’investigació i desenvolupament en tecnologies avançades. Si esteu interessats, teniu una pàgina amb més informació.

The free/open-source machine translation platform Apertium, originally created by the Transducens group, has been selected again as one of the projects supported by Google in their Google Summer of Code program. Students from around the world can now apply for one of the 5,000 USD grants for working for three months in one of the ideas proposed for the project (check the list of ideas here). Proposals and new ideas can be discused with the mentors in the IRC chanel #apertium in freenode.net or through the mail-list apertium-stuff@lists.sourceforge.net. The next steps will be:

• From April 9 to April 21: discussion of the ideas with project developers.
• From April 22 to May 4: submission of proposals.

Interested students can contact with Mikel Forcada.

The Miguel de Cervantes Digital Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France have become the first recipients of the new Stanford Prize for Innovation in Research Libraries (SPIRL). The prize was created to recognize efforts to transform research libraries through innovative programs, projects and services.

The Transducens group is one of the parters of the Abu-Matran European project of the Seventh Framework Programme. Abu-Matran is coordinated by Dr. Antonio Toral from the Dublin City University. The consortium is integrated by Dublin City University (Ireland), Prompsit Language Engineering (Spain), Transducens Research Group at Universitat d’Alacant, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at University of Zagreb (Croatia), and Athena Research and Innovation Center in Information Communication & Knowledge Technologies (Greece). The project will be developed during the next four years (2013-2016) and it will fund the collaboration between the company and the academia institutions involved in the project through contracts and secondments. The project is aimed at developing methods for the quick creation of machine translation systems for Croatian (a new member of the EU) and related languages.

The system presented by the researchers of Transducens group Miquel Esplà-Gomis, Felipe Sánchez-Martínez, and Mikel L. Forcada, was the second best system in the cross-lingual textual entailiment (CLTE) for English-Spanish task according to the ranking published for the task 8 of SemEval 2012. CLTE is a natural language processing open problem which consists of detecting semantic entailment relations between texts written in different languages. The system presented by the Transducens’ researches uses a multiclass classifier informed by features obtained from machine translation.

The free/open-source machine translation platform Apertium, originally created by the Transducens group, has been selected again by the Google Summer of Code initiative. This summer, eleven students from several countries around the world (out of the 1,200 total students participating in the programme) will get a grant of 5,000 USD from Google to work for Apertium for three months. In addition, two members of Transducens (Francis Tyers and Mikel L. Forcada) will participate in this edition of Google Summer of Code as mentors of some of these students.

The system presented by the researchers of Transducens group Víctor M. Sánchez-Cartagena, Felipe Sánchez-Martínez, and Juan A. Pérez-Ortiz in the 6th Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation, was one of the two best performing systems for Spanish to English translation.