Intellego

Intellego is a machine translation project for the benefit of Mozilla and the Open Web.

Project details

Our Mission

To provide users with automated translation, from any language, to any language, in real time, on any software or device that is useful to them.

Our Vision

A world where language is no longer a barrier to communication on the Internet and people can understand each other effortlessly regardless of their linguistic origins.

Our Values

Language is free; language is beautiful; language deserves to be protected; a single language isn't the future; the Internet belongs to everyone and everyone has the right to participate and benefit from it.

Our Motto

We Will Be Understood.

Technical details

Intellego will be a machine translation platform consisting of various open source engines based on the most prominent approaches to MT (i.e., SMT, RBMT, EBMT, and hybrid).

Research has revealed that certain approaches produce better output for certain language pairs and content types. For example, Russian's grammar is incredibly complex. So much so, that SMT output for Russian is usually very flawed. The RBMT approach has demonstrably produced better output for language pairs that include Russian. In addition, RBMT is best suited for long sentences and structured content, like wikis, whereas SMT is best suited for short sentences and user generated content.

Intellego will aim to provide a single API for engine developers and a unified web service that hosts a number of different language pairs/engines/implementations in the back end.

This aims to increase accessibility to smaller, more efficient MT engines on the web. Kevin Scannell gave this example: "If you look at Apertium for example, there are some language pairs that are better performing than Google Translate, and many pairs that Google doesn't support at all. But they don't have the infrastructure to keep a web service up and running (they've tried and it's been up and down)." This will help break up the proprietary nature of MT and allow for a greater presence of open MT on the web.

In addition, it will help to satisfy our aim to make the Intellego platform available through an open API and web services, as is stated on the wiki.

The GSoC terminology-based project will serve as a pre-processing utility in the Intellego MT process to provide accuracy in translation.

Research suggests that when a user evaluates MT output, they tend to be more accepting of MT error when it is grammar based, rather than terminology based.

Project meetings

The Intellego team meets every week to discuss the progress of the project.

We also occasionally have sprint meetings, where we work on a particular aspect of the project for a long stretch of time.

For more information about meetings, see our meetings page.

Resources

• MT Research
• Intellego team etherpad

Team

Jeff Beatty (gueroJeff) (gueroJeff)

Team lead. Localization, programming.

Majken Connor (Kensie) (Kensie)

Community outreach, evangelism.

Gordon P. Hemsley (GPHemsley) (GPHemsley)

Linguistics, programming, BCP 47 (language tags).

Mekki MacAulay (mekki) (mekki)

Strategic management, partnerships, grants, business collaboration, evangelism.

Discussion

• IRC: #intellego
• Newsgroup: mozilla.tools.l10n