Getting started with the GiellaLT infrastructure on the Mac

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.

System setup of your Mac before GiellaLT installation

You must first prepare the Mac, by first installing XCode:

1. Xcode

Proceed with installing a number of command line tools, using one of:

• HomeBrew
• MacPorts

Installing HFST, our linguistic compiler

You need tools to convert your linguistic source code (lexicons, morphology, phonology, syntax, etc.) into usefull tools like analysers, generators, hyphenators and spellers.

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:

• hfst
• vislcg3
• apertium
• libdivvun (divvun grammar checker components + command line tool)

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.

Some alternative compilers, strictly speaking not needed

The following two programs are not needed, we just refer to them since the source code is compatible with them:

• If you need a fast compiler for development work you may also install the Xerox tools. It is freely available but is not open source and can not turn the analysers into spellers. The software itself is found under the link NewSoftware, Binaries Only is enough. Unpack the files and store them in e.g. /usr/local/bin/.
  • Update: Lauri Karttunen died in the spring of 2022, and his home page at Standford — with the downloadable software — is not available anymore. The software is still available via the Wayback Machine. The download links above are updated accordingly.
• You may also use Foma, but for most languages on this site you will in any case need the program hfst-twolc (a program in the hfst family) for the morphophonology.

Installing an editor

You will need a text editor for writing the source files. One of the following

• SubEthaEdit is our preferred editor at UiT (Mac only). It has nice syntax modes:
  • modes for lexc, twolc and more
  • mode for Makefiles
• Atom is also a good editor, which works for all operating systems. It has lexc and twolc modes.
  • Atom is no longer being supported or developed, it has been archived.
• Textmate is another good editor. Remember to install the mate command line tool for opening files from the command line.
• If you are familiar with Emacs or vim you might as well continue with what you are used to.

Now go back to the Getting Started page for the next step towards building, using and developing the linguistic analysers.