GiellaLT provides an infrastructure for rule-based language technology aimed at minority and indigenous languages, and streamlines building anything from keyboards to speech technology. Read more about Why. See also How to get started, and our Privacy document.
This page is a part of the overall Getting started page. It describes what you need to install on the Mac to be ready to develop language tools for your language.
Note that this documentation is relevant when you want to participate in building and developing the grammatical tools yourself . If you only want to use the ready-made grammatical analysers, skip this and see the Linguistic analysis page instead.
You must first prepare the Mac, by installing XCode:
Proceed with installing a number of command line tools, using one of:
You need tools to convert your linguistic source code (lexicons, morphology, phonology, syntax, etc.) into usefull tools like analysers, generators, hyphenators, spellers and grammar checkers.
Run these commands:
curl http://apertium.projectjj.com/osx/install-nightly.sh \
> install-nightly.sh
chmod a+x install-nightly.sh
sudo ./install-nightly.sh
This downloads a shell script (1), makes it executable (2), and runs it (3). The shell script in turn will download and install prebuilt binaries for programs for morphology, syntax, machine translation and grammar checking:
At the end of the installation, script will suggest additions of the environment variables to your profile. Follow these instructions.
You get the latest version of all required tools in one go. Rerun these 3 commands with regular intervals to get the latest updates.
HFST is our default compiler, and it builds all our tools. It is open source, and it is needed for turning your morphology and lexicon into spellcheckers and other useful programs.
The following program is not needed, but can be used instead of HFST for some languages (those without .twolc files): Foma. It is faster than HFST, but does not have all the tools in the HFST family. The best of both worlds you get by installing HFST and using the Foma backend, which is the default.
One good use of Foma is to compile FSTs using both Foma and HFST, and then run make check. Any differences in the output from the two tools are likely to indicate bugs.
NOTE on Xerox tools: we used to support compilers from Xerox, like the original lexc and xfst tools. The author of these tools, Lauri Karttunen, died in the spring of 2022, and his home page at Standford — with the downloadable software — is not available anymore (but still available at the Wayback machine). There is also no-one to maintain the (closed) source code of these tools, and as time goes, the Xerox tools have become more and more problematic to keep supported. We have thus decided to remove all support of the Xerox tools from April 2025 on. While the tools are still downloadable via the Wayback machine at the link NewSoftware, they won’t be used by the GiellaLT infrastructure anymore.
You will need a text editor for writing the source files. One of the following
Now go back to the Getting Started page for the next step towards building, using and developing the linguistic analysers.