LING/CSE 472 Software

In this class, we will be using Python, the LKB grammar development environment, xfst and the SRI language modeling toolkit. All of these are installed on the machines the linguistics Treehouse for our use. You are not required to install them on your personal computer. However, since folks sometimes want to, here is some info:

• Python: First check whether you already have Python on the machine you are considering installing it on. On a linux/unix machine (including macs running OS X), type "which python" at the command prompt. If you don't have it, you can get it here. You also have access to Python on Dante. If you want to do more Python programming, you probably should use an editor which understands Python syntax and will indent things properly for you. Emacs is one, and it is available on Dante. You can get emacs for Windows (for free) here. Finally, here is a reference guide to Python.
• LKB: The LKB (Copestake 2002) is available here. If you want to use the LKB with emacs (can be handy), follow the directions from last Spring's linguistics 567.
• xfst: xfst is not freely available. All copies of Beesley & Karttunen's 2003 book come with a single-user license.
• SRILM: The SRI Language Modeling toolkit is installed on Patas (the Linguistics Department's server). Source code can be downloaded here. The executables can be built on a Unix system or on a Windows system equipped with the Cygwin porting layer.