Getting Started

‘NOTE!’ Giellatekno and Divvun recently (May 2020) moved the linguistic source code and its core support files from svn to github. Our other pages (documentation, icall, administrative pages …) are still in svn. These documentation pages are still lagging behind. Eventual references to linguistic resources on svn are probably outdated. Otherwise, the pages should still be ok.

This page documents how be able to building, use and developing the grammatical tools yourself. If you only want to use the ready-made grammatical analysers, see the Linguistic analysis page. You should first ensure the Hardware and operative system requirements are set, thereafter you should get the Giella source code, and finally you should compile the analysers. Each of these three steps are presented below, with links to relevant routines. Return to this page for the next step after each step 1-2-3.

1. Hardware and operative system requirements

• Machine requirements: 8 Gb RAM is needed for Hfst transducer compilation (4 Gb is fine if you only want to use the Xerox compilers)
• OS/System - you will need unix. This is set up in the follwoing way, depending on your OS:

  • Setup instructions for: [Macintosh

    GettingStartedOnTheMac.html] // [Linux

    GettingStartedOnLinux.html] // Windows

2. Getting the Giella source code for your language

a. Download only the core files and th language(s) you need

Follow these instructions (under the Only the GT core and the wanted language(s) heading) to only check out the required parts for working with a single or a few languages.

b. Download documentation files

Option (b) is actually only needed for people working at or for Divvun or Giellatekno.

Check out our svn repository, then run $GTHOME/gt/script/gtsetup.sh - this gives you everything but is quite big, more than 3.5Gb in download size, and twice as much on your hard-disk.

c. Setup on a multiuser server

Option (c) is relevant only to system administrators

You may also set up the core and single languages on a multiuser server. To use this configuration, follow these instructions:

• install the giella-core - instructions for sysadmins
• check out your language - instructions for linguists

You may also setup the full structure on a server. Follow the instructions under (b).

3. Compile the analysers

The page Compiling And Using The Analysers tells you how to do just that. Thereafter you can start using the analysers and/or do the the development work…

For the full range of possibilities, there is an overview of the technical documentation for details on how to use our infrastructure to develop your morphologies, lexicons and more to create tools for yourself and your language community.

A final note

This list is written for people not working at Divvun or Giellatekno. You may also look at the longer list of what we install for our new workers and the checklist for what new users should know, and see if some of that is interesting. But this document will give you what you need to get started.