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.
NB! Support for building fst’s using the Foma compiler is experimental, and only works
with a few languages at the moment. Specifically, the following is required:
.xfscript) for the morphophonological descriptionAlso, only a subset of the total package of fst’s are built using foma for
now. More fst’s will be added over time.
To install Foma, do the following:
svn co http://foma.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/foma/ foma-read-only
cd foma
make
sudo make install
There is a Foma home page, where you may read more about the compiler, and also download binaries (in case you have troubles installing).
To configure a language to be built with foma, do the following:
./configure --with-foma
To also turn off Xerox (if you have it installed), you can add
--without-xfst. The default is to always
use the Xerox tools, but if they are not installed, the fallback is to use
the Hfst tools if nothing else is specified. Foma must always be enabled
explicitly. If Foma is enabled, Hfst is turned off unless you explicitly also
enable Hfst.
There are a number of differences between Foma and Xfst, but most of them are additions on top of Xfst. That is, Xfst-based source files are always compatible with Foma.
There are a couple of exceptions, they are listed here as they are found:
echo string with the character “=” - this turns echo
into a defined net with the name echo.