This presentation will describe the Apertium project (http://www.apertium.org). Apertium develops a free/open-source platform for machine translation and language technology. Apertium also develops data for many languages, with a focus on lesser-resourced and marginalised languages, but also develops data for larger languages. The platform, including data for tens of language pairs, a translation engine and auxiliary tools is being developed around the world, both in universities and companies and by a growing numbers independent free-software developers. There are currently 40 published language pairs within the project (including a number of "firsts" — for example Spanish—Occitan, Breton—French, Basque—Spanish, North Sámi–Norwegian Bokmål and Kazakh–Tatar among others), and many more in development.
The talk will be given by Dr. Francis M. Tyers. Dr. Tyers has been involved in the field of free/open-source machine translation for nine years; he completed his PhD at the Universitat d'Alacant, and now works as a postdoctoral researcher at UiT Norgga árktalaš universitehta. He has published over 30 articles related to machine translation, and has been involved in the teaching of several courses on machine translation. He is secretary of the ISCA SIG SaLTMiL (Speech and Language Technology for Minority Languages), the ACL SIG SIGUR (Uralic Computational Linguistics) and the Apertium project.