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By now many of you have probably seen this new Microsoft Australia campaign, “Ten Grand Is Buried Here.com,”¹ which calls Firefox “old” and Safari “boring”:

I’m not sure what this is saying about me, but my immediate reaction was to go check whether tengrandisburiedthere.com was available. To my surprise, Microsoft had yet to snatch it up! A few hours later, here’s the result:

Go ahead, visit the site and give it a try!

Note: Not being a marketing guy, I just threw some text together to introduce Firefox. If someone has some better copy for this display, please let me know.

As we move closer and closer to shipping a Ubiquity with there is still much work to be done, particularly in the area of localization. In a recent Ubiquity meeting we laid out the explicit localization goals and non-goals of as follows:

• Goals for 0.5
  • Parser 2 (on by default)
  • underlying support for localization of commands
  • localization of standard feed commands for a few languages
  • Parser 2 language files for those same languages
• Nongoals for 0.5
  • distribution/sharing of localizations
  • localization of nountypes

The overall goal for this release of Ubiquity is to come up with a format and standard for localization. Localizations in Ubiquity 0.5 will only apply to commands bundled with Ubiquity, and the localization files themselves will be distributed with Ubiquity. In a future release we will tackle the problem of localizations for commands in the wild and truly croud-source¹ this process.

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This past Monday I presented at Tokyo 2.0, Japan’s largest bilingual web/tech community. I presented as part of a session on The Web and Language, which I also helped organize. Other presenters included Junji Tomita from goo Labs, Shinjyou Sunao of Knowledge Creation, developers of the Voice Delivery System API, and Chris Salzberg of Global Voices Online on community translation.

I just put together a video of my Ubiquity presentation, mixing the audio recorded live at the presentation together with a screencast of my slides for better visibility. The presentation is 10 minutes long and is bilingual, English and Japanese.

Ubiquity: Command the Web with Language 言葉で操作する Web from mitcho on Vimeo.

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Here’s a quick screencast highlighting some of the changes to Parser 2 and the updated Parser 2 Playpen. This video should be particularly useful to people hoping to add their language to Parser 2. It’s also a good reference for Ubiquity core developers.

Changes to Ubiquity Parser 2 + Playpen from mitcho on Vimeo.

All the features covered, as with all Parser 2 features, require that you get the latest Ubiquity code from our Mercurial repository.

Yesterday I was invited to give a lecture for students the MEXT IT Specialist Program. ITSP is a partnership between Keio, Waseda, and Chuo Universities and NTT, IBM, and Mozilla to bring advanced IT training and opportunities to their Master’s students. It was a longish time slot so I decided to split it up into two different talks: one on open source and open processes (similar to one of my sessions at the recent BarCamp Tokyo) and one on the future of interfaces, internationalization and globalization, and Ubiquity. Here are the slides for posterity. (Note: the second set of slides is mostly in Japanese.)

昨日は文部科学省の先端ITスペシャリスト育成プログラムの学生の為に講義をしました。ちょっと長めの時間だったので、二つのトークに分けてみました。第一部は「オープン」と言うアイデア、特にオープンなデザイン過程の利点について。第二部は未来のインターフェースと国際化とUbiquityの紹介でした。スライドをここにslideshareにあげておきました。

Design processes in the open-source era オープンソース時代のデザインプロセス

Ubiquity: Interfaces and Internationalization インターフェースと国際化

Mitcho on Ubiquity i18n / l10n on YouTube

This past weekend was Mozilla Party JP 10 here in Japan and one of the speakers was Bob Chao (趙柏強) of Creative Commons Taiwan and MozTW. We got to talking in Chinese and he got a video interview of me talking about Ubiquity and our upcoming Parser 2 and the challenges of localization. I’ve never talked about my Mozilla work in Chinese before so it was definitely a challenge and I stumbled a lot, but hopefully some of the ideas got through.

前天我參加了Mozilla Party 10，一個日本 Mozilla 社群的會議。我在 Mozilla Party 才認識台灣 Mozilla 社群的趙柏強，我們就開始講國語。因為我自己很想念用中文，所以我非常高興有這個機會跟他談話。以後他拍一端 video，我給台灣的 Mozilla fans 把 Ubiquity 介紹一下。我的中文真的亂七八糟，大家對不起喔。 ^^;

On Saturday I went to Mozilla Party 10, a community event organized by Mozilla-gumi (もじら組). Mozilla-gumi has been an active community in Japan for the past 10 years, making it one of the oldest Mozilla communities around. Despite the cloudy weather in Shinjuku and the ever-present swine flu scare, we had over 100 people attending.¹

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Jono’s recently been thinking about how to get users involved with aside from programming, and he decided to put the textual content of Ubiquity’s builtin commands and the new interactive tutorial on the wiki for all to edit.

• Command documentation wiki
• Interactive tutorial wiki

Changes made to these wiki pages will be tracked and edits will be moved back into the Ubiquity codebase as early as 0.1.9.

Combined with the imminent internationalization of Ubiquity commands, allowing contributors to localize commands without digging into the JavaScript code, there will soon be lots of different ways for to get involved with the further development of Ubiquity!

Now that Parser 2 is in decent shape and a number of parsing problems in different languages have been tackled, the focus has now shifted to coming up with an approach for localizing Ubiquity commands and nountypes. At last week’s weekly Ubiquity meeting we had a great conversation on this subject, which then has continued on the Google group.

I’ve been framing this problem as two subproblems:

1. What will be the data structure of localized commands/nountypes within Ubiquity?
2. How do we distribute/share these localizations?

We’ve mostly been discussing the first problem, weighing the merits of unified objects (with different localized text as different JS properties) as opposed to a gettext-style approach, and noting that our requirements for commands and nountypes may be different. I hope we can discuss the second issue more in the coming week.

Should everything go through the command author? Should localization be centralized through some web tool? Should it be completely distributed like commands currently are? I invite you to join us in this conversation on the Google group. ^^

Jono and I had a good conversation this morning on IRC about the remaining Big Issues which are blocking the release of Parser 2 as the default parser for Ubiquity. Here are our Top 4 Big Issues:

1. Some commands’ preview’s and execute’s are not working properly (trac #652). This could be an underlying issue with some pipes not rerouted correctly in Parser 2, or it could be that the commands have not been rewritten correctly to take advantage of Parser 2.
2. Flesh out how to localize resources, like commands and nountypes. We started a conversation on this subject a few weeks ago but we never reached a resolution. This blocks issues 3 and 4 below.
3. We need to standardize a format for commands for Parser 2. As noted in last week’s meeting (among other places) Parser 2 will require at least some modification to all commands. Jono and I came up with a simple hybrid format for commands which specify takes and modifiers for Parser 1 and arguments for Parser 2, but until we figure out how exactly the localization of commands will work, we can’t write a definitive standard.
4. Enable nountype localization. While the most popular nountypes used are those that ship with Ubiquity, it is important to come up with a localization process which can apply to custom nountypes as well. Nountype localizations need the ability to either (1) replace the _name only, or (2) replace both the _name and the suggest() logic, as both cases will be necessary.

Given that Big Issue 3 and Big Issue 4 are both dependent on Big Issue 2, there clearly needs to be a continued public discussion of how we should make these resources localizable. I look forward to this discussion taking place at tomorrow’s joint (general + i18n) Ubiquity meeting.

In other news, here are some Small Issues:

1. Add a switch for parser version and language settings: Jono’s already made a space for this in the new “Settings and Skins” page in about:ubiquity. He’s on it. Like a bonnet.
2. Magic word (anaphor) substitution is not yet working properly. This needs to work both when there is an explicit magic word and when there are simply missing arguments.
3. The position of suggested verbs is always sentence-initial (trac #655). This also requires that we can specify whether verb name localizations are sentence-initial forms or sentence-final forms.¹
4. …

Let’s hit the code!

This past Saturday was Tokyo BarCamp 2009 at Sun’s Yoga offices. I of course gave a presentation on Ubiquity and our recent localization efforts, including Parser 2. As you can see, I signed up quickly:

CC-BY-NC iMorpheus

Here are the slides I used in that session. There are two “demo” sections in the slides… the first was a simple demo of Ubiquity 0.1.x showing off the translate, map, and edit-page commands. The second demo was of Ubiquity Parser 2 and showing off how little code it takes to add your language to Ubiquity with Parser 2.

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Thanks to the great work of Sandro Della Giustina, we now have a preliminary Italian parser for use with Ubiquity Parser 2. Sandro brought up a good point, however, about Italian prepositions which contract with the article and the head noun. For example,

traduci   dall'inglese     al     cinese
translate from=the=English to=the Chinese

One current solution is to add zero-width spaces after these contracted articles, all’ and dall’.¹ The appropriate way to add this to the parser is by defining a custom wordBreaker() method.

it._patternCache.contractionMatcher = new RegExp('(^| )(all\'|dall\')','g');
it.wordBreaker = function(input) {
  return input.replace(this._patternCache.contractionMatcher,'$1$2\u200b');
};

Grazie Sandro!

Here’s a little picture of the different sections of text in a single parsed argument and which properties of the resultant argument object they are assigned to.

You’ll see, from left to right, outerSpace, modifier, innerSpace, inactivePrefix, input/data, inactiveSuffix.

The example text is from the Catalan example, “compra mitjons amb el Google,” meaning “buy socks with Google.” You’ll notice the argument “amb el Google” is literally “with the Google.” The normalizeArgument() method of the Catalan parser, as I described earlier this week, strips the article “el ” and puts it in the inactivePrefix property of the argument.

I’m going to spend the rest of the day updating Parser 2 design doc and related documentation so they match these and other recent developments in the parser.

Yesterday I blogged on how to deal with portmanteau’ed prepositions in Ubiquity Parser 2, a common problem in various romance languages. Today I’ll propose an approach to another romantic problem.

The problem:

Weak pronouns in romance languages (as well as some other languages) have a special property where they cliticize to the verb, moving from its regular argument position to a position next to the verb. For example, in French, we have an imperative like (1) with gloss as (2):

1
2

Envoyez  le  lettre à  Pierre!
send.IMP the letter to Pierre

If we replace le lettre or à Pierre with a preposition (le, “it”, or lui, “to him”, respectively), those weak pronouns move next to the verb—in particular, (5) exemplifies the change in word order. Replacing both arguments with prepositions creates the stacked clitic form of (7).¹

3
4
5
6
7
8

Envoyez-la à  Pierre!
send   -it to Pierre
Envoyez-lui la  lettre!
send   -him the letter
Envoyez-le-lui!
send   -it-him

The fact that these weak pronouns are attached to the verb and lack separate delimiters mean that we will need a separate mechanism to parse these arguments: indeed, this functionality has been planned in Ubiquity Parser 2 as “step 3”. Here I’ll examine some data and discuss a strategy for the parsing of weak pronouns.

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The problem:

In many romance languages, prepositions and articles often form portmanteau morphs, combining to form a single word.¹ Some examples include (French) à + le > au, de + le > du, (Catalan) a + el > al, de + les > dels, per + el > pel. Italian has a particularly productive system of portmanteau’ed prepositions and articles… I refer you to the contraction article on Wikipedia.

As I noted a couple weeks ago, however, some combinations do not form portmanteaus.²

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