                           SFST README


Installation (Unix, Mac OS/X and Linux only)
============

You need the GNU version of the make program, the GNU C++ compiler and
the standard C++ library including the SGI extensions hash_set and
hash_map to compile this software, along with other GNU tools, such as
bison, flex and libreadline.

After unpacking the software package, change to the source
directory and call,

> ./configure

Then type:

> make

to compile the tools. Then call

> make install

to install the tools in /usr/local/. If you would like to install
the tools in another location, call ./configure with the --prefix
parameter, e.g.

> ./configure --prefix=/opt/local

The subdirectory data contains a simple example of an English
morphological analyser, the source code of the German SMOR morphology
(with just a few sample lexicon entries), and the general morphology
XMOR which may be used as a starting point for the development of a
computational morphology.

Problems with readline
----------------------

If you get an error message from ./configure saying that readline is 
not installed, you can install it from source using the following link:

  http://directory.fsf.org/GNU/readline.html

Alternatively, if you are using Debian GNU/Linux or Ubuntu Linux, the 
packages you will need are:

  libreadline5-dev libncurses5-dev


Usage
=====

See the manual SFST-Manual.pdf in the doc subdirectory and the man
pages for more information on the SFST tools. doc/SFST-Tutorial.pdf
explains how computational morphologies are implemented in SFST.

If you want to implement your own tools based on the SFST code, have a
look at fst-infl.C and fst-infl2.C. They show how analysers are
implemented with the standard (fst-infl) and the compact (fst-infl2)
transducer format.


Author
======

The SFST tools have been implemented by Helmut Schmid, Institute for
Computational Linguistics, University of Stuttgart, Germany and they
are available under the GNU public license version 2 or higher.


Bug reports
===========

Please send bug reports and other feedback to schmid@ims.uni-stuttgart.de.

