SFST - Stuttgart Finite State Transducer

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Installation

SFST can be compiled in Unix/Linux, Windows and Mac operating systems.

The SFST command line utilities has a few external requirements.

• The "Flex" scanner generator which can be downloaded from: https://github.com/westes/flex. In linux systems they can be installed using package manager. For example, in Ubuntu, apt install flex installs it.
• The "Bison" parser generator available from http://www.gnu.org/software/bison. In linux systems they can be installed using package manager. For example, in Ubuntu, apt install bison installs it.

After unpacking the software package, in the top directory of source code,

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build .

to compile the tools. Then call

cmake install

to install the tools in /usr/local/bin.

If you want to install the tools in a different directory, specify a different prefix using the --prefix option:

cmake --install . --prefix /my/install/prefix

Finall, to install the manpages in /usr/local/man/man1:

make maninstall

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.

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.

Currently maintained by Santhosh Thottingal.

Please cite the following publication if you want to refer to the SFST tools:

A Programming Language for Finite State Transducers, Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Finite State Methods in Natural Language Processing (FSMNLP 2005), Helsinki, Finland. pdf

Same can be cited as:

@inproceedings{schmid2005programming,
  title={A programming language for finite state transducers},
  author={Schmid, Helmut},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Finite State Methods in Natural Language Processing (FSMNLP)},
  volume={4002},
  pages={308--309},
  year={2005}
}