[Apertium-stuff] GSoC & Master Thesis project together

Dear Apertium members,

I'm a Spanish computer scientist currently doing my Master at Technical
University of Munich (TUM) This is my fourth and last semester and what I
have left is my master thesis. I'm still considering different thesis
projects. Besides, I had a strong desire to work this year on a GSoC project
but I was about to dismiss this idea due to the big timeline overlap between
both projects, both requiring full dedication, because of the
European/German university calendar. My final idea was the possibility to
combine both my master thesis and the GSoC project into the same endeavor.

It's been a great surprise to find just today your group and your proposals.
I'm highly interested in machine translation and in particular interested in
transducers and hidden Markov models ---the analysis of sequential data in
general---
and have a good firsthand experience with these tools and understanding of
the mathematical background behind. As a matter of fact, for example, I'm
now about to submit a paper, together with my advisor Hasan Ibne
Akram<http://www.sec.in.tum.de/hasan-ibne-akram/>,
to FSMNLP 2011<http://ciaa-fsmnlp-2011.univ-tours.fr/ciaa/page.php?id=57&nom=callforpapersfsmnlp>on
an EM algorithm for weighted transducers. In this paper I further
elaborate with more details the algorithm designed by Eisner [1] and adapt
it to log space to work with it on a machine in practice.

So for example for your ideas I'm interested in the projects where
transducers are involved. I've already checked with my university and it is
possible to combine both the master thesis and the GSoC project together,
and Hasan Ibne Akram is willing to become my thesis's advisor for such a
project in conjunction with a mentor from you for the GSoC project. It's
also possible from the Google side.

So before further elaborating on an exact project, my question for you,
mainly for Jimregan, Francis Tyers, and Jacob Nordfalk, is: would you be
interested in such a project, mentoring a GSoC project that would be further
expanded to comply with the higher requirements of a master thesis?

I'm aware of the organizational difficulties such a project would involved
but because I'd love to work on it I'm sure I will make it work.

I'm in the irc channel (jmcejuela) if you wanna chat (en español, English,
oder Deutsch)


Thanks :-)


[1] Jason Eisner, Parameter Estimation for Probabilistic Finite-State
Transducers, ACL
2002<http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCAQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cs.jhu.edu%2F%7Ejason%2Fpapers%2Feisner.acl02-fst.pdf&rct=j&q=eisner%20algorithm%20transducer&ei=VsedTfDNOM6gOu7UzdME&usg=AFQjCNG7fJRgnZKkdT0kKoypUGKVGHqEFQ&cad=rja>



-- 
Juan Miguel Cejuela
   jmcejuela.com
   ju...@jm...
   twitting @jmcejuela <http://twitter.com/jmcejuela>
   +49 176 627 581 05

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