FAQ/Shupashkar and Qazan 2012

In late January 2012 (Monday the 23rd through Friday the 27th), the Apertium project led a course on machine translation for the languages of Russia at Chuvash State University in Cheboksary (Chuvashia).

I was one of the invited teachers, given my knowledge of Turkic languages, my experience with Turkic morphological transducers, and my background in linguistics. The remaining teachers were Francis Tyers and Trond Trosterud, and Hèctor Alòs i Font took care of logistics for the course.

We taught a group of over 20 participants (philologists, linguists, and computer scientists from Tatarstan, Udmurtia, Komi Republic, Mari El, Bashqortostan, Chuvashia, Kirov, Perm, Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Latvia), who over the period of 5 days learned how to build a machine translation system from scratch with the Apertium platform. In that time, each participant managed to create a basic machine translation system between a pair of languages (including Chuvash-Turkish, Udmurt-Russian, Tatar-Bashqort, and Finnish-Estonian). Several of these projects are being actively continued, and we hope to see computational resources for the languages of Russia grow.¹

There are pictures of the course and my time in Cheboksary on facebook.

We were also invited to Qazan (Tatarstan) after the end of the course (on the 28th), to present a round table on machine translation for the last day of TEL, a conference about technology related to linguistic copora of national languages, hosted by The Institute of Applied Semiotics, part of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan. There are pictures of the round table and my time in Qazan on facebook.

<a name="¹">¹</a> The morphological transducers developed to parse and generate forms in each language can also be turned into spell checkers and used for numerous other purposes.