Workshops of the Summer School "Coding for Language Communities"

Multi-platform User Interaction Guidelines

By Luis Marcelino, Instituto Politécnico de Leiria

On Monday, August 11th 2014, 11:00

• an Android application for mobile phone and tablet (using eclipse)
• an iOS application for iphone and iPad
• the web page using html

PDF of the slides

Introduction to Programming with Python

By João Oliveira

On Tuesday, August 12th 2014, 11:00

Tools for collaborative work

By Pedro Manha and Ricardo Filipe, Centro Interdisciplinar de Documentação Linguística e Social

On Wednesday, August 13th 2014, 11:00

In any team working on a given project, especially if that team is dispersed through one or more countries, there are a couple of problems, for instance: sharing the work being done by each member and debating the state and evolution of the project.

This workshop aims to give attendees basic knowledge of a couple of tools that can help mitigate the impact of the described situations. These tools are:

• git – a system designed to keep track of changes to a project;
• GitHub – A service that provides hosting for projects and allow discussion of the project.

After this workshop, it will be easier for attendees to start contributing to any project that uses these tools and create projects of their own.

Normalization of dialects/variants using FST technology

By Iñaki Alegria, IXA group at the University of the Basque Country

On Thursday, August 14th 2014, 11:00

Normalization of dialects and variants is an interesting are of the NLP. It is used for Information Retrieval on historical texts dialectal texts, preprocessing of dialectal variants (before processing these corpora using standard NLP tools), conversion speech-text...
There are two main approaches: rule-based and data-driven. Finite-state technology is adequate for both approaches.

In the first approach a grammar is written based on a linguistic description of the changes among the variant and the standard (or pivot) language. Toolkits for describing phonological/morphological changes are used. Foma will be the toolkit we will use for this.

The data-drive approach is based in a parallel list of words (pairs the equivalent words in the variant and the standard language). The toolkit is oriented to learn from this list and to generalize the changes. The noisy-channel model is very popular for this kind of task.  Phonetisaurus will be the toolkit we will use for this.

Slides

Basic material: slides_inaki.zip

Toolkits

Rule-based (foma): http://code.google.com/p/foma/

Data-driven approach: Phonetisaurus (http://code.google.com/p/phonetisaurus/)

Project

Development of a simple normalization-tool for a language/dialect (it would be interesting if the students propose a real problem where a list or a formal description is available).

See the programme >>>