The project manipulates text in many ways, organized in lexicons.
To edit our source file we need a text editor, which has to support UTF-8, and can save the edited result as pure text. You may use emacs and it's modes On a Mac you may e.g. use SubEthaEdit, for which we also have made modes for the relevant programming tools..
We publish our documentation with forrest
The project uses a set of morphological compilers which exists in two versions, the xerox and the hfst tools. The xerox tools are the original ones, they are robust and well documented, they are freely available for research, but they are not open source. The hfst tools are open source with no restrictions. Both compilers compile the same source files, and at Giellatekno and Divvun we use both compilers interchangeably. Files for practical programs we compile in hfst, sevaral extensions are available in hfst only, but on a daily basis the xerox tools have a somewhat faster compilation speed.
A third compiler is also able to compile source files written for xfst and lexc, the foma compiler.
The Xerox tools are: twolc (for morphophonology), lexc (for morphology), xfst (for compiling the final transducer) , and lookup (for analysis and generation). Hfst has the same tools (called hfst-twolc, hfst-xfst, etc.) as well as a long list of other tools.
The xerox tools can be found at fsmbook.com. They are documented in the book referred to on that page (Beesley and Karttunen), we strongly recommend anyone working on morphological transducers, both with xerox and hfst, to buy the book.
The programs are activated by printing e.g. lexc
and
then pressing the enter key. The tools are documented in Karttunen /
Beesley Finite-State Morphology:
Xerox Tools and Techniques. The tools may also be
installed on your own machine, be it on Mac OSX, Linux or Windows. One
version of the software is found on the CD accompanying the book, for
the latest version, ask Trond for reference.
The hfst tools can be found at the hfst download page. Documentation is found at the hfst wiki. For installation, see also our hfst3 installation page. Note that the documentation is mainly technical, for a pedagogical introduction, we still recommend the Beesley and Karttunen book.
Måns Huldén's oma may be downloadet at bitbucket.org/mhulden/foma. See our Foma documentation .
The easiest and the most effective way to do this (although a little scary at first) is to use commandline tools. We have made a short introduction in English and a longer document in Norwegian on this topic. The introduction on how to use our parser is also an excellent introduction on how to combine the individual tools.