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Goal: to create a modern high quality English to Assyrian dictionary, serving both Eastern and Western Dialects

Motivation:
There are a couple Assyrian dictionaries that let you type in an English word and get the Assyrian equivalent.  They’re uber useful but I wanted to address and nail down the following:
  • No site presents both the Western and Eastern Aramaic dialects
  • Search quality and relevance. I found just 1 site that gives really good search results. The other search result sites had to be paginated and manually searched through which is a big pain point for users
  • The main source of data comes from assyrianlanguages.org . Can’t say enough about how good the data on this site is
  • Audio player, phonetic pronunciations, and definitions
Technologies:
  • View Layer: React.js (Less CSS)
  • Hosting: Microsoft Azure
  • Backend app: parse platform with customer Express.js cloud code
  • Data: mongodb
  • Data scraping: scrapy (python)
  • Native mobile: Android and iOS development kits
How:
Step 1: Compile a list of the most commonly used english words
Step 2: Using python scrapy, scrape various Assyrian websites for retrieving translations, audio, and phonetic pronunciations of both dialects
Step 3: Create a ranking system for the results
Step 4: Present the results in a clean and simple web app
Step 5: Integrate a native experience on the Assyrian android app using android RecyclerView

Improvements:

  1. machine learning: Taking a machine learning course. I’m excited about using learning methods to improve the classifiers to create even higher quality search results! 
  2. Manually curate the words to add more words into the dictionary.  
  3. admin portal to give language experts the tool to make this the highest quality English to Assyrian dictionary