How are you going to build a machine translation system unless you know at least a little bit about language? You will be required to give a short presentation (~10 minutes) on a particular language, e.g., Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Hindi, Italian, or Maltese.

You should prepare three to six slides for your presentation, covering language facts (demographics, location, etc.) important linguistic characteristics (orthography, morphology, syntax) and computational efforts such as resources, tools, papers. For instance, how many entries are there about the language in the MT Archive and what are they generally about? Be creative and have fun. Asking for help from native speakers or language experts is great. But you are ultimately responsible for the presentation.

Nizar Habash inspired this assignment. For inspiration, check out:

• Examples from Nizar’s class
• Ethnologue
• Omniglot
• About World Languages
• Machine Translation Archive
• World Atlas of Language Structures

We will grade on clarity and detail. Did you learn something really cool? Tell us!

Presentations

TBD

Day	Language	Presenter(s)
October 3	Italian	Nawaf Al-Dhelaan, Jingyi Wu, Huanyu Yang
October 5	Singlish	Shuo Sun, Ke Li, Xutai Ma, Shijia Liu
October 10	Hindi	Adhiraj Yadav, Dhananjay Singh, Manya Wadhwa, Vishal Rao
October 12	Spanish	Achintya Gopal, Philip Piantone, Eric Calder et al.
October 17	Hebrew	Shijie Wu, Chenyang Zhao, Pamela Shapiro, Lawrence Wolf-Sonkin
October 24	Esperanto	Harrison Huh, Shreya Aggarwal, Alex Gain
October 26	Japanese	Zikun Chen, Yu Zhao, Fan Yang
October 31	French	Channing Kimble-Brown, Rebecca Marvin, Najoung Kim, Steven Shearing
November 2	Korean	Xiaofeng Qiu, Ziyan Wang, Kwang Bin Lee, Baekchun Kim
November 7	Brazilian Portuguese	Tanay Agarwal, Ryan Newell, Jonathan Liu, Gary Qian, Dylan Lewis
November 9	ASL	Xuan Zhang, Digvijay Singh, Yirui Wang
November 14	Mandarin	Dongji Gao, Kun QIan, Szu-Jui Chen
November 14	Telugu	Sankalp Kolhe, Aswin, Nikhil Kulkarni, Rohit Ravoori, Amitoj Kaur