Corporate and Institutional Members

EAMT Corporate and Institutional Members

Apertium

Website: http://www.apertium.org


What is Apertium?

Since 2004, the Apertium project (www.apertium.org) develops a free/open-source machine translation platform, initially aimed at related-language pairs but expanded to deal with more divergent language pairs.

The mission of the Apertium project is to collaboratively develop free/open-source machine translation for as many languages as possible, and in particular:

  • To give everyone free, unlimited access to the best possible machine-translation technologies.
  • To maintain a modular, documented, open platform for machine translation and other human language processing tasks
  • To favour the interchange and reuse of existing linguistic data.
  • To make integration with other free/open-source technologies easier.
  • To radically guarantee the reproducibility of machine translation and natural language processing research

Resources

The current version of the platform provides:

  • a language-independent, configurable machine translation engine
  • tools to manage the linguistic data necessary to build a machine translation system for a given language pair, and
  • linguistic data for a growing number of language pairs (23 stable language pairs in March 2010)

Apertium's work with lesser-resourced languages, such as Welsh and Breton, has brought it national media exposure in the UK and France.

Free/open-source software for research and business

Apertium software and data are all distributed under either version 2 or 3 of the GNU General Public License. This, on the one hand, contributes to radically reproducible machine translation research (see http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Publications), and allows companies such as Prompsit Language Engineering to commercially offer services based on Apertium.

The Apertium community

Apertium development was initiated in 2004 by the Transducens research group at the Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics of the Universitat d'Alacant, as part of a joint project with the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, the Universidade de Vigo, Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Elhuyar Foundation, imaxin|software and Eleka Ingeniaritza Linguistikoa.

Currently Apertium has more than 100 registered developers coming from these institutions and companies, or from the wider free/open-source community that has formed around it. Apertium has twice been selected by Google as a 'Mentoring Organization' for Google Summer of Code, where Apertium developers are paired with students, to guide them through the development of new features.

Why has Apertium joined the European Association for Machine Translation?

Even if Apertium developers come from all over the world, most of them are based in the Europe-Middle East-Northern Africa area. We in Apertium share the objectives of the EAMT, an effective platform to make machine translation known and available to everyone and to promote its development.

Links and resources

Contact:
Francis M. Tyers, fty...@dlsi.ua.es
Mikel L. Forcada, m...@ua.es