Having problems installing HFST and using emMorphPy on Windows

[ivanalaterza]

hfst installation for Windows doesn't work - I followed the instructions given here https://github.com/hfst/hfst - with no success. I can't use emmorphpy without hfst. anyone else having the same issue? Please advise how to resolve this. Thanks!

[dlazesz]

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but emMorphPy is not tested under Windows and only guaranteed to work under Linux. Even with proper installation of HFST it will not work, I have recently tested it and fixed an encoding bug presents only on Windows.

The class EmMorphPy() has a parameter hfst_lookup where you can set the location of hfst-lookup executable which has to be installed from http://apertium.projectjj.com/win32/release/hfst-latest.zip by putting the following files into a directory in path (or set the absolute path of the file hfst-lookup.exe as parameter) :

• hfst-lookup.exe
• icuuc65.dll
• libgcc_s_sjlj-1.dll
• libstdc++-6.dll
• icudt65.dll
• libdl.dll
• libhfst-53.dll
• libwinpthread-1.dll

When hfst-lookup can be accessed, the initialization of the class will be blocked by readline() as readline() blocks on Windows and returns empty string on Linux.

To make it work in a platform independent way, the whole IO handling have to be rewritten. Which will obviously not going to happen as Quntoken also does not support Windows.

I recommend using

• Ubuntu
• emtsv Docker on Docker Desktop for Windows
• WSL preferably WSL2
• Free REST API service (which has its own limitations, but you can setup your own version following the guide): https://emmorph.herokuapp.com/