This hackathon was organized in the context of “4 Years From Now” (4YFN), the bussines platform [...]]]> Yesterday, Mikel Artetxe was awarded in Barcelona with the second prize in the First Hackaton on Language Technologies organized by Red.es in collaboration with  the Spanish Plan to promote Language Technology managed by the Spanish Government’s SESIAD agency.

This hackathon was organized in the context of  “4 Years From Now” (4YFN), the bussines platform created by Mobile World Capital Barcelona to promote technological startups. Several IXA members participated as organizers (German Rigau, Iñaki Alegria and Rodrigo Agerri).

Eight projects participated in the final session yesterday in Barcelona. Mikel developed a free alternative that allows the automatic creation of  bilingual dictionaries offering examples with real uses of words (an application similar to Linguee).

The QUIZ Bowl team was the winner in our codefest competition. Congratulations!

Aims:The [...]]]> This a list of the aims of the projects in CODEFEST 2016 summer school and the results achieved by each of them. Further information can be found in Codefest_dss2016 website.

Quiz Bowl: Multilingual question-answering for trivia games with Wikipedia

The QUIZ Bowl team was the winner in our codefest competition. Congratulations!

Aims:The question-answering trivia quiz project is in progress. To start the first game prototype, the team is using some of the questions translated into Basque on Monday. This prototype  matches the Basque Wikipedia articles with the questions or hints from the quiz, so that the answer to the hint pops out as an article.

Results: We had the chance tre o play a quiz based on Wikipedia trivia: Human vs. Computer. This time humans have been the winners, but by a very small margin only.

The code is available here: github.com/dss2016eu/codefest/tree/master/quizbowl
References to all the code generated in #codefestdss2016 will also be posted there!

Create a morphological analyzer for your minority language

Aims:In order to develop the morphological analyzer for Hungarian language, Ixa group members Iñaki Alegria and Montse Maritxalar have gathered to offer their help in programming tasks. After creating a list of the lexical roots of Hungarian, they have made a selection based on verbs and adjectives, among other criteria. Afterwards, they want to computerize that selection through a specific program in lexc format.

Results: They have explained several projects they’ve been developing through these days, all of them related to machine translation devices: for Hungarian, Buryat (a variation of Mongolian), Rif Berber (language spoken mostly in Morocco), Uyghur (Turkic language spoken in Western China), among others.

NLP for Literature Analysis and Creation

Aims:Members of the group have chosen the name Story buffet for their tools for analysis and creation of literary texts. The team is made up of linguists, programmers and other experts who consider themselves to be “hybrids” of the two.

On the second day, we had a break so that people from Ixa group (the ones in charge of this project) could explain their work to us. Manex Agirrezabal is an expert on metrical analysis in poetry; therefore, along with his knowledge in programming/coding, he thinks this is a great chance to semantically alter short stories. Originally, Itziar Gonzalez-Dios’ field of study was linguistics, but she has joined the world of programming in the last few years; she is interested in the analysis of the complexity and synthesis of texts.

Results: They have showed their webpage (Story buffet) for literature creation and analysis, in a quite humorous way.

Behagune

Aims:The team has continued developing the Behagunea project making use of their different abilities. Victor (programmer) has visualized the results of the Ixa-pipes, and he is working on designing an attractive interface. Also, Dani (IT expert) is trying to translate Ixa-pipes resources into Catalán. Sabrina (linguist), with the help of Iñaki (programmer), is starting an app based on tweets to study what countries think about each other. Finally, due to some problems, Kassandra has decided to put aside one of the projects: the one that aims to include social media in the website DSS2016EU Iritzien Behagunea (Opinion Observatory). Instead, she has chosen to examine the tweets about the DonostiCup football competition.

Results: They have accomplished their goals. Apart from adding new languages (Catalan, Italian) to the Behagunea project, they have managed to merge social media and geolocalization.

Enriching ZureTTS platform with new languages

Working hard on #ZureTTS #codefestdss2016

Aims: Several aspects of the project ZureTTS have been treated. On the one hand, the members of Aholab have focused on developing the platform to include the dialect from Iparralde (the northern side of the Basque Country), and they have started both writing the questions for the voice donors and designing the new interface. Concerning the app for Android, they have spent the day identifying errors and preparing everything required to install the new platform. To conclude, in the “Ireland team” they have translated the webpage interface into Gaélic and contacted some Irish experts within their university to get hold of a good, reliable database.

Results: At the end of the week, apart from adding the Lapurtera (Basque dialect) version to the web, they’ve made a huge progress in Gaelic, thanks to the help of the Irish people specially.

SRL and Dockers

Aims: Members of the SRL project have been structuring a database to add and handle information later on. As Suhail Sarwan says, developments in SRL mean a direct benefit in the field of semantics, particularly if we want to promote and improve the e-learning model. Aided by Rodrigo Agerri, among others, they have worked on the SRL, and Eleanor Dutton intends to develop a tool for linguistic analysis and to apply it to Moroccan Arabic.

Results: They showed us a tool they have developed to identify the participants of the events described by the predicates within a sentence, by sequence tagging methods.

Machine Translation for minority languages

Aims: Each member of the group is focusing on the pair of languages in which he/she is fluent. Based on the program called Apertium, for example, they have started working on a translator for the language combination French-Occitan, so that they can later develop a linguistic analyzer for Occitan. They have also been working on a Tetum-Portuguese translator (the two official languages spoken on the island of Timor) with the same program. Others have started preparing lexical transfers (they will try to do the same with dependency transfers) for the English-Spanish combination using  Matxin. This exact same program also allows the creation of a English-Welsh translator, as well as a translator for English-Basque (one such translator already exists, but some errors must be identified and corrected). The latter will be applied in the field of medicine.

Results: They have explained several projects they’ve been developing through these days, all of them related to machine translation devices: for Hungarian, Buryat (a variation of Mongolian), Rif Berber (language spoken mostly in Morocco), Uyghur (Turkic language spoken in Western China), among others.

Donostia / San Sebastian 2016 European Capital of Culture represents an enormous opportunity to turn the focus on culture and dialogue as the roads towards improved coexistence. Thus, Donostia / San Sebastian aims to become a benchmark in the sphere of creative processes and culture.

Inside the programme, we are organising Codefest: Coding [...]]]>

Donostia / San Sebastian 2016 European Capital of Culture represents an enormous opportunity to turn the focus on culture and dialogue as the roads towards improved coexistence. Thus, Donostia / San Sebastian aims to become a benchmark in the sphere of creative processes and culture.

Inside the programme, we are organising Codefest: Coding for Language Communities event, that will take place from 4th to 8th of July 2016 in Donostia / San Sebastián.

Codefest summer-lab, aims to revitalise resource scarce languages by providing them with effective tools for electronic communication and by teaching their communities how to use them. http://dss2016.eu/en/dss2016eu/voices/codefest

This one-week long hands-on course will give participants the opportunity to become acquainted with the latest language-based technologies and to develop different apps based on them. Partakers will work in a multidisciplinary coding bee that will team up linguists, software-engineers and students.
http://dss2016.eu/en/dss2016eu/voices/codefest/project-proposals-codefest

Registration and Important Dates

Registration to attend Codefest is now open. You can register online and you will receive information about the payment procedure. If you are staying in Donostia – San Sebastian we will also collect information to arrange your accommodation.

Early registration: May 10 , 2015 at 11:59pm PDT
2nd Registration (if empty places): June 18
http://dss2016.eu/en/dss2016eu/voices/codefest/sign-up-codefest

Fees
•    Basic registration (5 day participation, official dinner, welcome bag): 40€.
•    Full registration (5 day participation, accommodation, 6 nights in a double room, official dinner, welcome bag): 260€.
•    Full + Wikipedia edit a thon ( 5 day Codefest participation, 1 day Wikipedia edit a thon, accommodation, 7 nights in a double room, official dinner, welcome bag): 260€.

Some IXA members participated in the Natural Language Processing, Text Mining and Big Data Hackathon organised by our colleagues from the OpeNER project. And they obtained excellent results:

From the OpeNER project we are inviting coders, linguists and (product) designers to join us for a one day Hackathon around Natural Language Technology and Text Mining large datasets (e.g. Sentiment analysis, Named Entity Recognition).

There’s a large collection of state of the art webservices, datasets and APIs available of which all “core” [...]]]>

From the OpeNER project we are inviting coders, linguists and (product) designers to join us for a one day Hackathon around Natural Language Technology and Text Mining large datasets (e.g. Sentiment analysis, Named Entity Recognition).

There’s a large collection of state of the art webservices, datasets and APIs available of which all “core” developers are present to help you get started.

This is your chance to kickstart your next big idea, see if the technology can help your research or your company,

… or simply enjoy the newest of the newest in language technology for a day.

• Tuesday, July 2, 2013
• 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM
• Studio K Timorplein 62,
• Amsterdam (map)