Apertium is a fast-growing Machine Translation platform.
The last 6 months Swedish-Danish, Norwegian nynorsk-bokmål and Esperanto-English was added to the portfolio of over 20 released language pairs.
Apertium is unique because:
- not only the translation engine, but also all language data and supplementary tools have Free / Open Source licenses (mostly GPL)
- it requires a reasonable amount of resources - a new language pair can, in cooperation with volunteers from Apertium, be done in half a year's free time
- it can be developed without having a university degree in neither linguistics nor computer engineering
- has a very active and extremely helpful environment, with participation of universities, companies and independent (volunteer and paid) developers.
During the talk I will introduce the core functions of Apertium.
During the workshop we will install Apertium, and play with (and improve) the language data, to get better translations.
There is an introductory article (in Danish) you can get for free at DKUUG's booth, in their member's journal.
Jacob Nordfalk is an external lecturer at the Copenhagen University College of Engineering (Ingeniørhøjskolen i København) and co-developer of Apertium, where he has made Esperanto-English. In Spring 2009 he was mentoring a Swedish-Danish language pair.